


Track Marks

by SixStepsAway



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Brain Damage, Canonical Brain Damage, Domesticity, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, Drugs, F/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Slow Burn, and frank's around, and you can love someone while loving someone else more, basically karen falls off the wagon when she finally stops being able to pay matt's rent, because a lot of the plot was dumb, both for addiction and ptsd, both things of which are applied to both of them, but i doubt it because there wasnt anything important to this, but right now neither of them are exactly thinking sexy thoughts, but there might be a reference or two to any established past canon in that, but you can love someone while knowing it's not going to work out, canon typical violence and gross matter, caretaker!frank, david is tired of being called at 3am, for the record i've loved matt murdock since season 1, frank (LOL) talk of triggers, frank is bad at this but he's trying, i also have a bit of a crush on charlie cox, i'm heartbroken btw, i'm trying to also be faithful to karen's love of matt because she DOES love him, im sorry it was, karen has been told she's a fuck up so many times she believes it now, karen's in a pretty dark place and frank like... always has been, matt murdock is really dead (sort of), most people do "mutual pining" i do "mutual not having a clue they're in love", not DD season 3 compliant, obviously this isn't punisher s2 compliant, rating will PROBABLY rise to E in later chapters, set between the end of punisher S1 and DD S3, some talk of suicidal thoughts/ideations, who better to understand?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-09-04 23:01:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16798774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SixStepsAway/pseuds/SixStepsAway
Summary: Karen's finally has to give up on Matt's apartment, unable to keep paying his rent while he's dead, and it takes a toll on her. She goes back to drugs and Frank's around to help drag her back out of the dark.---She folded her arms, head slightly down, and he realised he'd never been around Karen when she had walls up before, when she was the one putting distance between them. He'd only ever been around the Karen who stepped over the line, who thrust herself into his face and demanded he trust her.He had no idea what was going on.





	1. Chapter 1

His phone buzzed in the middle of the night, a phone David had given him, the one that only a few people had the number to: David, Sarah, Leo, Zach, Curtis, Karen, and Madani although he was sceptical about whether that one was a good idea. 

He rolled over, grabbing at the phone. He wasn't asleep, but he didn't want to get out of bed, he just wanted to keep lying in the relative warm, and know that when he fell asleep his nightmares had finally started to ebb away, and it was no longer a hundred percent chance that he'd wake up from Maria getting shot again and again. He wasn't exactly having pleasant dreams, but he was finally able to get away from those nightmares, at least some of the time. 

He sat up, scrubbed a hand over his short hair and focused his gaze on the phone. There was only one text, since most people knew that he hated text messaging and would rather die than reply, and it simply read: _Karen's in the hospital._

There was no return number, and it wasn't from any of the people he knew to have _his_ number.

He forwarded it to David, then called him when he didn't respond right away. 

"I'm _sleeping_ ," David groaned into his phone, then there was a pause. "You all right?"

"Got a text. Can you check if it's true?"

"Yeah." 

They both sat quietly for the next few minutes, nothing making a sound except for David's keyboard and mouse, and then he said, "Yeah. Want the address of the hospital?"

"Yeah," Frank replied and the text came through a moment later. 

***

She wondered if this was what Frank felt like when he ended up in hospitals and if that was why he was always sewing himself up or collapsing bleeding on top of someone, if he too felt this desperate panic to get out before he got _caught_.

She was stuffing items into her purse, the things they'd taken off her in the ER, and she'd just pushed her feet back into her flats when she heard heavy boots down the hall, heading towards her room.

"Fuck." She swore under her breath, panic spiking in her blood, and then she paused, listening a little harder.

Whoever it was - heavy, male she thought - walked like military, sounded like military. She was used to looking over her shoulder at this point, too much time spent as Daredevil's sort of girlfriend making her a target, but there was nothing about those boots that would make her nervous on any other day.

Today, however, she wanted to get the fuck out so the nurses would just say, "Oh, no, you just missed her."

It turned out she wasn't that lucky. 

The door opened and in walked Frank Castle, which would usually be a comfort. She steeled herself, looking up from her purse as she checked her handgun hadn't been confiscated, and when he didn't speak she said, "What?"

Which wasn't her first mistake of the day.

***

He wasn't sure how to say _finding out you're in hospital is one of my many bad dreams, I'd rather we didn't do this, Karen_ so instead he found himself saying nothing, just checking her over with his eyes. She had a cut across her forehead, a bruise on her jaw, and he was positive she was hiding some other bumps and scrapes under her clothes (otherwise she wouldn't be in the hospital, surely?) but she wasn't too badly off, just worse than he'd ever like to see her.

Her _almost_ harsh tone caught him off guard and he frowned at her. "I heard you were in hospital, I was worried."

"I'm fine," she said and zipped her bag up, putting it onto her shoulder. "My car's totalled, but... whatever." She folded her arms, head slightly down, and he realised he'd never been around Karen when she had walls up before, when _she_ was the one putting distance between them. He'd only ever been around the Karen who stepped over the line, who thrust herself into his face and demanded he trust her.

He had no idea what was going on.

"What happened?" he said. "Was it Fisk?"

"Fisk?" She looked at him like he was crazy. "Fisk's in prison. You know that as well as anyone. I really need to get out of here."

"Yeah, well, I got out," he grumbled. "What happened?" He wasn't deliberately blocking her way, but he needed to know who he had to go shoot.

"I was in a crash," she said, "that's _all_ , my car went off the road." She pushed past him, not quite a shoulder but close enough to be surprising, and opened the hospital door. "I need to get home."

"Gonna walk?"

She froze in the doorway. "God... damnit."

"I'll drive you," he said. 

She let out a sigh and he wondered if this was it, if this was the point where she'd had enough of him and had realised she deserved better than him for a friend. "Fine," she said. "Where'd you park?"

***

The walk out to the car was silent. She had a slight limp in her right foot, probably from the impact, and he kept an eye on it as they walked, trying to judge if she was going to need more medical attention if she didn't quit putting weight on it. 

He unlocked his car, opened the passenger door for her, and she got in without saying a word. 

He got in the passenger seat, made sure the radio wasn't going to turn on when the engine started, then pulled out. "Still at the same address?"

"Yeah."

He drove for a good ten minutes in silence, trying to give her the space she seemed to desperately need, before he glanced over at her. She had her temple against the car window, her eyes closed, both hands in her lap. From what he knew about Karen, he was pretty sure that a car crash would piss her off, not put her into a quiet stupor of misery. 

And she was definitely miserable.

"Did, uh," he said, breaking his own internal promise to not invade her space, "someone get hurt, or?"

"What?" She looked over at him. She sounded nasally, a little more out of it than she usually did. He tried to glance over at her, figure out if she was crying, but it was dark even in the car and he figured it'd be a little too obvious to turn the light on. 

"You said you totalled your car but you seem..." He weighed a bunch of words in his head. "Unhappy."

She shrugged and slid down in her seat a little. Her jeans - something he wasn't accustomed to seeing her in - bunching up slightly around her thighs. Her hands stayed in her lap, eyes trained on her fingernails, and he frowned deeper when she just... didn't answer him.

"Did something happen with Red?" he asked. 

"Matt's dead," she said, shrugging. 

"I mean, I know Daredevil died i-in the... but..." He'd just assumed Matt Murdock, cockroach that Frank was sure he was, had climbed out on his face and trudged home to continue being the pest of Hell's Kitchen. "He's really dead?"

She stayed silent, for way too long, then said, "Seems that way."

"Fuck." He looked back at the road, paying extra attention and special care to making sure he didn't crash them. 

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, then he glanced over at her. "How long have you known?"

"Known what?" she said flatly. "About him being Daredevil or about him being dead or?"

"Either," he said, "both. I'm guessing you knew about him being Daredevil before he died, otherwise you'd be wondering why Matt disappeared right around the same time?"

She went silent. He realised he'd put his foot in his mouth and when he stopped at a red light he looked around at her. "I-I... I... I didn't mean to... upset you."

"He kept it a secret from me for two years," she said, "even when we were--" She broke off and shrugged in a way that made his heart hurt for her. "At least I knew before the end so I wouldn't wonder. The wondering's always the worst part."

He didn't speak at all this time, realising that he knew very little about her. She knew more about him than he knew about her. 

That was a new and weird concept for him to swallow down. He wasn't sure how comfortable he was with it.

He pulled the car back out as the light changed, cruising off towards her apartment, and they sat in silence as he drove. 

It reminded him of that time before, when they drove out to the diner, but this time the only tension between them was whatever was going on in her head, and he'd never been good at reading a woman's mind. Not ever.

(Sarah kissing him out of _nowhere_ , which apparently wasn't that big of a surprise (David could have warned him) was proof of that.)

"You know," he said, tapping his thumb against the steering wheel, "I have no idea what you're thinking." She didn't reply so he kept tapping the same tune against the wheel. "When I was married, I, uhh... upset the hell out of Maria one day, she got real fucked off with me, you know, when a woman goes real quiet? Said to come back when I figured out what I'd done since I wasn't listening to what she was saying." He had her attention, eyes slightly on him in the dark, so he kept going. "Turns out coming back with flowers wasn't what she wanted. I've never been good at reading a woman's mind."

"What did she want?" she asked, and had he been ten years younger he might have done a little victory dance because he had her attention finally. It was odd not having her attention. 

"Toilet was dirty," he said. "I'd gotten up, used it, gone off to do the stuff I was doing, y'know? Yeah? Then I'd used it again, couple more times after that, she'd watched me come and go and whatever. Finally she'd just snapped, demanded to know why cleaning the toilet was one of the few things outside of my wheelhouse, yeah? And so I said it wasn't, what was she on about? I totally missed the, y'know, connection because I'd been out on deployment so our dirty ass toilet smelled like roses to me, 'specially since it was home, yeah?"

She snorted. "She could've just thrown the toilet brush at you," she said. "S'what I would've done."

He smiled, just a little twitch in the corner of his mouth, and nodded sagely. "Well, if I ever dirty up your toilet you can do that." 

"It's not your fault she didn't just tell you plain," she said, but he could tell she was drifting away from him again. "Doesn't make you bad at reading people."

"Women," he said. "And, uh, you know David Lieberman?"

"Micro?" He had her attention again. 

"Yeah," he said. "I lived with him for a while there, and he was, well, dead, y'know? And uh... he had me visiting his wife."

"Oh no." It was the first real reaction he'd dragged out of her, beyond the snort. 

"Bringing her flowers and shit, y'know? Just, keepin' an eye out, since she was in danger and all." He stopped talking to turn a corner, careful of the junction, like somehow a car would come out of nowhere just to fuck up this weird report he'd managed to create between them in the dark. 

"You brought her flowers." Karen didn't have as much of a desire to not die as he did to not see a car flatten them, it seemed. "I can only imagine where this story is going."

"I think she thought I was, uh... well, y'know. Trying something there," he said. 

"Were you?" she said. "Flowers usually means..."

"I had to get in the house," he said gruffly, "the cameras had gone off."

Silence just sorta sat between them for a moment as Karen digested what he'd accidentally said.

"Cameras."

"David had some cameras in the-- Sarah doesn't know about it, but it was-- I mean it's how we-- It wasn't for anything _creepy_ ," he said. 

"Cameras," she said again, "in her house, that she didn't know about. Not creepy. _Got it_." 

"He was a little overprotective, considering they'd tried to kill him, and what happened to me and my family, y'know," he said. "Was the only reason we saved them, too, so I ain't gonna apologise for that."

"Did I ask you to?" she said. "I just said it was creepy."

He huffed and looked out of the window. "This your place?"

"You know it is," she said. "You haven't got cameras in my apartment, right?"

"No." He paused. "One on the outside window to see the flowers, dunno if it's still connected."

"Frank," she said, very slightly stern but not at all what he'd expect from her usually. 

"It's just one!" he said. "It's not like I walk by every day, how'd you think I knew you'd put the flowers there?" He pulled the car up outside and before he even had chance to speak to her she'd opened the car door and gotten out, taking her purse with her.

"Wh-- What the fuck?" He followed, slamming his car door and leaning on the roof. "That it?"

"What?" She looked around at him. "Oh. Did you want to come up?"

"No?" he said. "Yes? Maybe? But you're usually more..."

"More what?" she said flatly.

He didn't have a good word for it. Warmer? Welcoming? Friendly? Was she usually _nicer_? He was sure that last one wouldn't go down well, especially considering she already seemed to be in a damned terrible mood. 

"You know what," he said, opening his door back up. "It's fine. You've got my number."

He was half into the car when she said, "F-Frank," and he turned around, looking across the roof at her.

"Thanks," she said. "For coming to check on me and the lift and all. I'm fine though. You don't need to--" She broke off. "I'm fine."

"If you say so," he said, not moving to get back into his car this time. Whatever the problem was, he wanted to _help_ , damnit, like she'd helped him. He'd lost people too. Couldn't they bond over grief? 

It bothered him more than he'd ever admit that she was shutting him out when letting him in might help, when he could help _her_ instead of how she was always, always helping _him_. He didn't know how to work his way in past her walls, he'd never had to try.

Or maybe, he'd always been in the courtyard, and now he was facing up against the real doors, the _real_ walls, maybe he'd never been in to begin with.

"Look, like I said," he said as she started to turn away, "you have my number. I get it, y'know? I've... been there. You know that."

"It's not really the same," she said, looking at him. "I'm hardly going to dump my grief over one guy on you when you--" She broke off. He didn't know what she was going to say. It's not like he was coping with his grief very well. Was shooting people a strategy suggested in grief counselling? He doubted it. "You don't need my shit."

"Okay, sure," he said. "Maybe I want it? Turns out I'm pretty good at cleaning toilets." He paused. "I don't know where that went."

It seemed to work though, dragging a ragged laugh out of her, but she shook her head in the end. "Goodnight, Frank."

He wanted to follow her inside. He felt like he should. 

"You have my number," he said again, but he got into his car, turning the engine back on and praying a little inside that she'd call him back before he could drive away.

She didn't.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think Frank Castle snarling, "Who the fuck is TODD?" is my favourite thing to imagine, but I might be wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Two chapters in one day? Whaaaaaaaaaaat.)

Frank's phone rang at three in the morning, waking him from a distressed sleep where Maria and Karen were on the other side of a glass wall, trapped far away from him, where he couldn't help them at all.

"What?" he grunted down his phone as soon as he picked it up.

Silence.

"Hello?"

He heard a little sniffle. 

"Sarah?" he said, sitting up a bit. "Did something happen?"

"Uh." That wasn't Sarah's voice. _Fuck_. 

"Karen?"

"It's fine," she said, voice tiny and nasally and utterly _wrong_ on so many levels. "Sorry for waking you."

"No, no--" The line went _click_ as she hung up and for a second that was probably far, far too long he sat there, dumbstruck and horrified.

Then he called her back.

"What?" she snapped when she answered, which by itself was _so wrong_ , but it was an extra layer of wrong on top of the already wrong shit sandwich he was forced to eat. 

He had a few options: ask what was wrong (she'd say nothing, probably hang up again), have a go at her for hanging up on him _and_ for snapping at him (she'd definitely hang up again), try to shake some semblance of what the hell was going on loose by picking at her about it (probably wouldn't work), or...

"Where are you?"

She was silent for a moment, aside from some little sniffles, and then she muttered an address. He didn't recognise it, and it was definitely far from her home. 

"I'm on my way," he said.

"No, don't!" He was half out of bed and he didn't stop, despite her. "Meet me uh..." She said another address, a _different_ address, probably a few streets away.

"Are you sure?" he said.

"Yeah." She hung up again and he blinked at his phone, mostly just confused at this point. 

***

"Frank, for God's sake, it's three in the morning, you woke Sarah." 

Frank slammed his car door, hoping it'd make a point to David. "Can you look an address up for me?"

"I was _asleep_ ," David mourned, but he could tell from his voice that he was moving around, getting out of bed, pulling on that damn silk robe of his and ambling off to his computer. 

He turned the speakerphone on, tossed the phone onto the dash and pulled the car out.

"Are you going somewhere at three AM?" David said. Frank could hear him plodding off downstairs. 

"Yeah." 

"Thanks for all the information." His chair squeaked as he sat down. "What's the address?"

Frank repeated the first one Karen had given him, focusing on the road. 

"I don't even have to look that up, Frank," David said, "it's a drug den. Why're you asking after that? Do you need backup?"

Frank was quiet a moment. "Nah, I'm good," he said and hung up the phone. He'd get shit for that later, but right now he was wondering what the _fuck_ Karen was thinking going to a place like that alone chasing a story. 

"Christ," he muttered, hitting the steering wheel a few times with the heels of his hands. "God _damnit_!"

He only paid proper attention to the road to make sure he didn't die before he got to her, too angry and frustrated and _frightened_ to do it for any other reason, and then he was pulling up outside a building with a bench outside and Karen was sitting on it, hands folded between her knees, head down.

He took a breath, steadied himself to not go charging over and demand to know what she was thinking, then got out of the car and walked across. "Hey."

"Hey." She stood up, pulled her purse onto her shoulder. "Can we go?"

That pushed all the wrong buttons for him. "Are-- Are you kidding?" he said. "You think I didn't have Micro run that address you gave me? Come on, Karen, you know _better_ than to go to a place like that alone, you don't know shit about handling that stuff."

She laughed under her breath, rubbed at the bottom of her nose and turned her face slightly away. She wasn't looking at him, hiding behind her hair, and he fought down all the anger he wanted to throw her way to mask the panic he was feeling that _god damnit she could have been killed_. 

"What's the story, eh?" he said. "I'll help you hunt it down. We'll do it together. Just don't-- Did someone hurt you?" She still wasn't looking at him. "Did someone in there hurt you or... What happened? Why'd you call, eh?"

"Can we go?" she said again, voice smaller this time. She still wasn't looking at him. Whatever was going on, she wanted to get out, so maybe someone was looking for her, maybe she'd shot someone. He wouldn't put it past her. 

"Yeah. Whatever." He gestured at his car and she walked to it without speaking, opening the passenger door and getting in. He took a moment to breathe, compose himself, then got in the other side. "Back to your place?"

"Just uh..." Another few little sniffs, she pushed her hair back off her face and he noticed it wasn't clean. He'd never seen her anything other than impeccably dressed, clean, hair tidy and straightened and perfect just like her. "Take us around the corner? There's a park, it's, uh... there's no lights, 'nd uh..."

"All right." He pulled the car out, kept one eye on her and another on the road. "Is something wrong?"

"Just drive," she said and he swallowed hard enough that his throat hurt, but complied.

It was a few minutes before she gestured out of the window and he noticed the little park she'd mentioned. "Just here's fine," she said and he pulled up, by the park but away from the street lamps. 

He lowered his hands to his thighs, rested them there and didn't look at her. Just waited. He could do that. Sarah said he was a good listener because he didn't really talk much, so maybe that's what Karen needed now. Maybe instead of yelling at her for being a _fucking idiot_ and getting herself into trouble again, maybe she just needed him to sit real quiet while she talked.

He was proven wrong almost immediately by the fact she didn't talk either. 

His mind was reeling, and he started talking before he even realised what he was doing. "You tryin' to join him?" he said. "You trying to get yourself dead or somethin' because I don't... I can't come up with another reason why you'd be so--" Be nice, Frank. Be _nice_. "--god damn fucking stupid to walk into a drug den like that and not call someone to help out? I dunno, Karen, you could've called Foggy or you could've called _me_ or anyone else you know, don't you have _friends_ to call? Someone else from the Bulletin or _somethin'_ , but not go walking in there _alone_. I don't get it. I don't understand why you'd do that."

Silence fell back over the car, heavy like a blanket and just as suffocating. She stayed utterly silent, her fingers shaking in her lap, and he went back to not speaking either, looking out of the window.

"Fuck it," he said after a minute, reaching to turn the engine back on, "I'll just take you home."

Her hand whipped out, covering his where he'd touched the key, just stopping him from turning it. He looked over at her, but she wasn't looking at him. 

Maybe he was right and she just needed him to be quiet, so he huffed out a breath, pulled his hand from the key and put it back on his leg, other hand finding the steering wheel and resting there. "All right," he muttered, "we can just sit."

A few minutes passed, then she pulled her purse off her shoulder, unzipping it and dropping it into his lap.

"It doesn't really match my outfit," he drawled, and she let out a shaky little laugh.

"Go on," she said, and it took him a moment to track what she was asking him to do, then he frowned, turned the overhead light on and opened up her bag.

He pulled her wallet out first, putting it on the dash and checking across at her. She had her eyes on the bag, but she wasn't stopping him or correcting him, which meant whatever he was doing, he was doing the right thing. He pulled her phone out, put that closer to her but also on the dash, above the radio. He pulled a small makeup bag out next, smiling internally because he'd never seen anything so very _Karen_ before, just small and black and containing only a couple of items, just enough to keep her face perfect but nothing over the top. 

He put that down carefully, checking across at her again to make sure she didn't want him to open that up, then pulled her gun out. It hadn't been fired recently from what he could tell, and he set that down beside her phone. 

On the bottom of her purse was a brown paper bag and he pulled that out last, making to put it down.

"No," she said and he glanced at her. She gestured at the bag. 

His heart started to sink. Whatever it was, she couldn't tell him. She was always so verbal, using words to convey so much meaning he could never hope to manage with his own, and whatever this was she had to show him, had to stay _quiet_ about. 

He flattened her purse on his lap, unrolled the paper bag where it was folded down, opened it up, turned it over and tipped it out onto his lap.

A half dozen items fell out: a few plastic straws, a spoon, a lighter, an old credit card and five or six little sachets of white powder. 

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He leaned his elbow on the door, scratched at the top of his head and looked across at her, completely wordless. She met his eyes and he willfully ignored the fact her pupils were smaller than they should be in such a dark car. "I, uh..." He chuckled, the only reaction he could manage, and scratched some more at his scalp. "Wow, you sure know how to surprise me. What is this crap?"

She reached over, but she didn't seem to be planning to take it back so he let her. She flicked one little packet, half-empty from what he could tell. "This one's cocaine," she said, and retracted her hand. "The rest are heroin." She looked out of the window.

"So you--" He couldn't finish the sentence so he looked out of his own, then back around at her. "Did, uh... You go in for a story and buy to get out or..."

"No." She wasn't looking at him. He wasn't sure what he'd do if she did. "I went in for the coke."

"And you came out with..." He couldn't finish that sentence no matter how hard he tried. "Guess I'm back to asking if you're lookin' to die or somethin'."

"Dunno," she said, head against the window. 

He stared at her for a minute, then took a steadying breath and shoved the items back into the paper bag. "Right." He paused. "Why'd you call me?"

That startled her, like she'd forgotten she was the one that dragged him out here at three AM to ruin whatever chill he'd managed to grapple back over the last couple of months. She looked around at him and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Uh, they didn't have any coke."

He looked at her flatly because that explained nothing and she rubbed at her nose and _oh_ , suddenly he understood why she sounded nasally and why her nose was red and fuck, _fuck_. Fuck.

"I've been buying coke from them for the last, uh..." She trailed off. "Dunno, but a while. I ran out. Went back for more. He'd run out, only had the one bag and, uh... I couldn't imagine not having any and I... So he sold me that." 

"Did you use it?" he said and his voice sounded far more strangled than he'd ever want to admit to.

"Yeah," she said. 

He tightened his grip on the wheel with one hand because it was either that or break the window by his head and flexed his fingers. "Right." He hit the wheel with the heel of his hand and she jumped. "Still doesn't answer the question."

"I called because I used it," she said. "He, uh... showed me how and packed me off with..." She gestured across at the brown bag. "And I realised what a fucking... f-fuck up I am."

He wasn't feeling like arguing with her over that, so he looked back out of the window and stayed quiet. "So you called me."

"Who else would I call?" she choked out.

He took a deep breath, letting it burn in his chest before he let it out again. "Right," he said. "Guessing you knew I wouldn't take this shit lying down, yeah?"

"Yeah," she agreed.

He drummed his thumb against the wheel, mulling over his options in his head, then he folded up the paper bag, tucked it between his thighs, dropped all her stuff back into her purse in the order he took it out, and turned the key, starting the car.

"Frank?" she said.

"Yeah, don't talk to me right now," he muttered, checking his mirrors. "If I get pulled over by the cops and arrested for this shit I'm going to be furious."

"Okay," she said and he didn't look at her, didn't want to see the fact she hadn't laughed at his dumb joke, too out of it to find it funny. He'd think it was hilarious if he wasn't currently wanting to shoot himself in the face with her gun. 

"Who, uh..." He watched the road and it was a good excuse to not look at her if nothing else. "Who got you into this shit?"

"Todd," she said.

"Who the fuck is _Todd_?!" he said in disgust.

"First guy I shot," she said and looked out of the window.

He was sure that in her addled brain this made some kind of sense to her, but it made none to his. "Did he hook you before or after you shot him?" 

"Before," she said.

"Just checking." He fell quiet, trying not to look at the paper bag in his lap, and when he looked over she'd fallen asleep against the door, eyes closed and one hand balled into a fist.

"Christ," he muttered, and turned the corner to drive back to his place.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three in one day. Okay! Last one today, though, I'm off to bed. Hope you're enjoying reading this as much as I'm enjoying reading it :)

Frank would be lying if he said he'd never thought about Karen in his bed.

Ever since he'd been shot in the head, his dreams had taken on a slightly psychedelic feel. He used to nightmare about Maria and the kids getting shot, over and over and over until the idea of sleep was horrifying to him. No one wanted to watch their wife and kids die every night for the rest of their life.

After everything with Billy and David and Madani and Lewis, his dreams had started to change. They morphed into something weird at first, dreams where he was having Thanksgiving dinner with his family and David's family and they all got killed, dreams where Lewis blew up his family, dreams where Madani was shooting David, ones where Billy was taking them all out one by one with a pistol and Frank couldn't move.

 _Then_ they started turning into slightly less anxious, terrified dreams. He started dreaming about David being the one in his bed, which was weird and not something he was entirely comfortable questioning, and a few times he'd woken himself up with a confused yelp when he'd walked in to join Madani in the shower. 

(He acknowledged she was a very beautiful woman, but he wasn't ready to date - let alone get into the shower with - someone who wanted to arrest him. He was pretty sure he'd never be ready for that.)

And then there were the dreams where Karen was in the place of his wife. 

He'd never jerked awake from those (much like the oddly domestic dreams about David had just resulted in him waking up, muttering, "What the fuck?" and rolling onto his face), but they, much like the other dreams, varied in their level of _weird_. Sometimes he was kissing her. Sometimes she was in the place of _David's_ wife. Sometimes she was in his bed, asleep in a sunbeam and he was just watching over her, and nothing bad happened.

Sometimes Billy shot her.

Sometimes Frank did.

He'd definitely never dreamt about her asleep in his bed, coming down from heroin.

He'd been pacing for the better part of an hour, paper bag clutched in his hand, and finally he gave up, calling David.

"Are you serious."

"How do I dispose of, uh... drugs?" Frank said. 

There was a small pause and then David said, "Well, you should probably take them to the hospital, they have pharmaceutical waste disposal, uh, you could drop them at the police station or call Madani--"

Frank cut him off. "Flush 'em. Got it." He shut the bathroom door behind him, lifted the toilet seat with the toe of his boot and ripped open the first packet.

"I feel like you didn't call me to ask how to dispose of drugs," David said flatly. "Don't flush bags, you'll clog the plumbing."

Frank paused, already halfway to tossing the bags with the contents. "Right." He emptied them out instead, phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder.

"Do you want to tell me what's going on?" David said after a minute. "Did you get bored and raid a drug den?"

"I wish," Frank grunted. He washed the baggies out under the tap, then tossed them, empty and clean, in the trash can before flushing the contents down the toilet. 

Once the toilet was done flushing, he closed the lid and sat on it, rubbing his hand across his forehead.

"Frank?" David said.

"'m here," Frank muttered. 

"Did something happen, big guy? Do you need help?"

Frank took a deep breath. "What do I do for someone to help get 'em clean?"

David was silent a moment. "It sounds like you need help."

"I--" He probably did. "Look, I-I don't know _shit_ about drugs, al'right? Maria and I, we'd have a glass of wine with dinner some nights, and sometimes I'd drink a bit on deployment but it always made me fuzzy the next day so that shit, it just wasn't worth it, y'know? And Billy, fuck, he never did anything that wasn't straight and narrow, not that I knew about. Maybe he was a junkie, how the fuck would I know? But I sure didn't at the time if he was. I don't know what the fuck you're supposed to do for someone who's taken too many fuckin' aspirin, let alone this _shit_. I don't do this shit!"

"Frank," David said. "Do you want me to come over?"

"No." He scratched at his scalp some more. "No..."

"Okay, uh, what did they take?"

"Cocaine and heroin," Frank said flatly. "She's been doing the coke for a while, 'pparently, didn't fuckin' call me instead of--" He took another deep breath, what felt like the sixtieth of the night so far. "Coke a bunch. Heroin tonight, first timer it sounds like."

"Right, okay." David was quiet a moment. "If she's not hooked on heroin, she's better off. That's... Yeah. It's a bad one, Frank. But if she's been doing coke and she's coming down, it'll be rough. Both is, uh... Yeah. She'll come down over the next few days, then she'll... want more. She might get mean or-- You gotta keep her away from buying more, basically. Keep her fed, warm, give her water. If you've got anything in the apartment, you gotta clear it out."

"Like what?" Frank said roughly.

"Anything." David sighed. "Prescription meds, over the counter meds, alcohol. She'll go for anything she can get her hands on."

"Christ," he said. He didn't have a lot, a bottle of some booze he'd picked up at some point tucked under his bed and a couple of bottles of aspirin for when his headaches got a bit too much for him, but the idea of things so mundane having to be gotten rid of for Karen's sake baffled him in a way he wasn't used to, or happy about.

"Look, man," David said, "junkies... they're not easy to deal with. You might wanna just take this girl to rehab. I can find some good centers, I'll help pay for it..."

"I'm not taking her to a center and abandoning her," he grunted. He didn't say it aloud, but the thought _she wouldn't abandon me_ went through his head. "No way. She can just come down here."

"Is this someone we know?" David said cautiously. "Did Madani--"

"What?" Frank straightened up sharply. "Wait, does Madani have a fuckin' problem like this too? Jesus fuckin' Christ is it everyone I know? Do you snort ecstasy or some shit?"

"Not Madani then!" David said. "I don't think she's done drugs and no, I don't-- I don't think _anyone_ snorts ecstasy, Frank. Jesus." He sighed. "Do you want me to come over?" he asked again.

"No." It definitely felt like a lie this time. "Actually, yes, but not tonight."

"I think you mean this morning," David grumbled at him. Frank ignored him.

"Can you uh, bring some groceries over? I'll pay you back for it, but uh, I need like..." Everything. He just had cans. "Just get Sarah to make up a list of shit she'd buy for you guys and bring me over some bags and I'll give you my shit to get rid of."

"Right," David said. "Anything else you want while I'm doing your groceries for you?"

"Don't think so." A pause. "Bottled water and some soda or something."

"Anything _else_?" David said. Frank didn't miss his smug tone.

"No." He hung up on him, which he was sure to get bitched out for tomorrow, but for now he was just going to have to live with it.

When he left the bathroom, Karen was still asleep. She'd taken her shoes off, argued weakly with him over taking her jeans off too, and then he'd tucked her into bed. He hadn't said it at the time, not wanting to embarrass her further, but he'd wanted to check her pockets while she slept, which was what he did now.

He turned her jeans pockets out first, checking them for anything she might have hidden away, then he checked the seams. He didn't think she'd sew drugs into the lining of her clothes, but he was definitely going to check that too. He didn't find anything, so he folded her jeans up and put them on the chair by the bed, then located her purse where he'd dumped it on his ratty sofa. 

He emptied that out again, onto the coffee table this time. He took her gun away (which hurt him, a little), and tucked it where his guns were, locked away safe, then went through everything else in her bag. Her wallet didn't have anything in it besides money and cards, no cigarettes, no baggies, no paraphernalia, and he put that safe to one side. He went through her makeup bag next, checking everything in it was what it seemed to be, then putting it back away with the utmost care. 

He'd just finished repacking her purse when he felt eyes on him, and he looked up to see she was sitting up in his bed, watching him.

"I was just checking for--"

"No, it's okay," she said, "I know." 

He felt like her fire had been snuffed out, like she'd been hollowed out and he was talking to an odd, scarecrow version of her. "You're not mad?" 

"No." She pushed her hair off her face.

"You, uh, wanna use the shower?" he said and gestured. "Get cleaned up?"

"Not really." She rubbed at her nose. 

"Right." He swallowed and didn't move from the sofa, keeping a watchful eye on her. She didn't speak, so after a minute he rested his elbows on his knees, looked across at her and said, "So you've been on this stuff, what? How long? A year?"

She shook her head. "Nah," she said. "Uh, I wasn't when-- when I saw you last. I was clean, then." 

"Clean," he muttered. He wouldn't call himself clean, he'd never used drugs so the idea of him being _clean_ was bizarre. He'd call himself sober, or he'd say he'd never used anything like that. Karen using the word _clean_ for herself was startling in the worst way possible. Clean meant she'd been dirty. Clean meant she'd been high before. Clean meant he'd let her _down_. 

"Yeah." She picked at his sheets, head down still, and he didn't take his eyes off her. "I, uh... started up again, after..."

He hesitated, nervous suddenly. "After Lewis?"

"What?" She looked up and there was sudden clarity in her gaze. "No. Not after that. Uh... That wasn't so bad? For me, at least. Uh..." She scratched at her hair and lowered her head again and he stood up, walking across and sitting on the other side of the bed from her.

"It's okay," he said, "you... you can tell me anything. Whatever happened, it's okay..."

She pulled her knees up to her chest, but kept the covers over her legs. He didn't look, keeping his eyes trained on her face as she visibly struggled to find the words she was after. He didn't move, or hurry her, he just waited.

"After Matt d-died," she said, "uh... I kept paying rent on his..." She pushed her hair behind her ear again and snuffled into the sleeve of her shirt. "I thought... I thought if I kept paying, he'd come back." She looked away from him. "Guess that sounds stupid to you."

"Nah," he murmured, "s'why I never went back to the house. I could convince myself my-- Well, I could tell myself they were there and I just wasn't with them."

"Foggy paid up the last month for me, well, we split it. But uh... He never believed Matt was going to walk through the door like I did, I guess he thought I was being--" She broke off and shrugged. "I guess I was. But, uh, not long after I saw you last, I... I called my dad?" She let out a shaky, watery little laugh and rubbed her sleeve against her nose. "I asked if I could m-maybe come spend a few weeks with him, get out of the city. He said it wasn't really a good time, and I got that, I did, but uh... I ran out of money? To pay for Matt's... I was running on savings, really, and Foggy thought I should give it up and he wasn't _wrong_ so I... I cleared out his... I moved a lot of it into my place, just in case, you know?" She looked at him finally, blue eyes swimming with tears, and he nodded.

"Yeah, I know," he said. 

"But then I, ah... I stopped wanting to go home." Another little laugh, like she was laughing at her own stupidity. He didn't think it was stupid at all. "I kept staying at the Bulletin, staying late as I could. I wasn't spending any money 'cause I wasn't paying for Matt's-- I wasn't eating, either, really. I caught myself thinking about g-getting high and Ellison, he... he noticed I wasn't looking after myself, so he made me take-- Well, he called it a sabbatical, but I think he meant mental health leave." Frank half-chuckled, just a little, and she smiled crookedly. "It worked wonders, as you can tell."

"Oh yeah," he said. "You've never seemed saner."

"Anyway, I went home," she said, "sat in my living room and I knew Matt's stuff was tucked under my bed and I realised I..." She trailed off. "I kept looking at photos and thinking about how he wasn't ever coming back either, and I called dad again. Asked if I could come home. Begged, I guess. He said no."

He felt the urge to murder rise and he stamped it down. "Well, he's a shit dad then."

"Nah," she said, "I wouldn't want me back either." 

"Didn't he know how fucked up you were?" he said.

"He knew how much of a fuck up I was," she corrected, "that's what matters."

He couldn't imagine ever telling his little girl she couldn't come home, no matter how 'fucked up' she might have ended up. But then again, he'd do anything to have her back in his arms now, so maybe he was biased. Maybe if she hadn't died, he'd be turning her away too if she'd turned out like Karen?

No, he couldn't get his head around that concept.

Nor could he get his head around another. "Why didn't you call me?"

"Oh, uh... After everything with... Madani and Lewis, I, uh... I called Lieberman? When I hadn't heard from you in a while, I called him and I guess he's why you texted me your number, but uh... You hadn't contacted me." She rested her chin on her knees. "Once everything was tidied up, I thought - I hoped - you were... maybe finding something better. A normal life? Maybe... letting yourself move on. Maybe you'd found your after. I didn't want to ruin that."

He frowned at her. "You are my after," he said, and he realised how that sounded the second it fell out of his mouth so he shook his head. "I mean... You're my friend, y'know? I wouldn't fuck off on you, Karen. I wouldn't... go get a normal life and not have you in it if you wanted to be."

"Huh." She pulled his covers up under her chin, looking small and scared and deeply ashamed. He wanted to tell her it was all okay, that she didn't need to be ashamed, that he wasn't mad at her, but the truth was he was furious: furious she'd not contact him before it got this bad, furious she'd _let_ it get this bad, furious she'd done something so fucking stupid, furious at Matt god damn Murdock for leaving her, furious he hadn't looked in on her sooner than the damn hospital. 

He swung his legs onto the bed, leaned back against the wall next to her and sat. He wasn't in the bed, there was no way he'd get into the bed with her, but he wasn't going to fuck off and leave her sitting scared and alone, no way in hell, so instead here he was in the middle ground, sitting like an idiot in his boots. 

"Well," he said after a minute, "I'm here now. Wish you'd called me sooner, but whatever." He reached out, hesitating in the moment before his hand met the spot between her shoulder blades. He was never sure if his touch could be comforting anymore, but he watched a little tension drain out of her body and that meant that yeah, maybe it could. He brushed his thumb along her back, attempting to up the amount of comfort he could give, and continued with, "It's fine. We can sort this out between us."

She looked around at him without dislodging his hand from her back. "You're not angry with me?"

"Oh, I'm furious!" he said, but he made sure there was no venom in his voice. She didn't flinch, so he figured he managed that. "I wish you'd called me sooner and I fuckin' wish you weren't so fucked up over Murdock."

She twisted around and his hand fell down between them. "I'm-- It's not just about him," she said, voice cracking. She looked away again and he wanted desperately to drag her back into whatever conversation they were just having because she'd just let him in and he didn't want her slamming the door in his face again so soon. 

"Then what's it about?" he said. "C'mon, I'm here, I'm listening. Talk to me while you've still got your wits about you." He folded his arms and scowled in her direction, but she had her head turned so she couldn't see it, which was the only reason he'd scowl right now. 

"I'm not good at dealing with loss," she said. "I'm a fuck up."

"You keep saying that," he said, "but it's not true. You helped take Wilson Fisk down, you helped me, multiple times..."

"Yeah, and I'm why a bunch of people are dead," she said. 

"So am I," he drawled. 

She rolled her eyes. "Bit different."

"Not really," he muttered and scrubbed the heel of his hand against his knee. "So, what, the drugs are self-pity?"

"No," she said, half a snap. "They're... It was either that or..." She rubbed at the back of her neck. "I don't know, Frank, I don't get to go shoot up everyone who hurt my family. This was all I had to turn to."

He tried not to take offense, but still muttered, "What am I? Chopped liver?"

"I didn't want to burden you!" she snapped. 

"Because, what?" he said. "I can't possibly understand how you're feeling? I don't understand loss?!"

"You were doing better," she said, voice cracking. "I hadn't heard about you in the news so you weren't dead, but you weren't... _around_ , either, you were... I thought you were..." She buried her face in her hands. "Fuck!" 

He swallowed hard, hands on his legs and not moving. "Look, I uh..." He scratched at his head. "David, he, uh... He'll pay for rehab, if you want. I can take you there and you won't have to deal with-- I know I'm not good at this shit, a'right? I--"

"No." She turned around, eyes desperate now. "Frank, no. I don't want to go to-- That stuff ends up on your record, I don't-- Please. Please, don't take me to rehab." He took a deep breath, ready to argue, but she kept talking. "It's not like I'm going to be a model junkie either," she muttered. "I've always been shit at getting clean."

"You've done it before?" he said. "Who helped you, then? Your dad? Todd?" He tried not to spit or growl the word, but he was pretty sure he failed.

She looked at him, confusion in her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Uh, no one. I... Dad didn't want me home so I got in my car, drove to college. Spent the first few weeks in my dorm just..." She shrugged and joined him leaning against the wall, their legs spread out down the bed side-by-side. "I didn't have anyone."

He rubbed his hand across his top lip, then muttered, "Eh, come on," and reached out one arm for her to curl into. She turned, tucking up against his side and resting her head on his shoulder. "You have someone now."

"Thanks," she murmured, hand finding a spot on his chest where his heart used to be to rest and closing her eyes. "'m still really high."

He kissed her head and closed his eyes. "Yeah, Karen, I know." 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you guys haven't already heard this song, you should listen to it because it's very, very Kastle (to me at least), and I have it on repeat while I write this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwS0FAjVDh0
> 
> (There's also two really pretty Kastle videos to it on YT!)
> 
> I've tried to do as much research into coming down from one go of heroin, and the ongoing withdrawal from cocaine, as I can, but obviously for the sake of the fic it's not going to be as accurate as reality would be (but would we want it to be?). Let me know what you think!

Waking up in Frank Castle's bed was not something Karen would ever have anticipated happening.

(No, no that was a lie. She could imagine it happening, had in fact a few times. She'd thought about it on the cold nights when she'd woken from dreams where Fisk had introduced her face to her fridge, and to get back to sleep she'd lain awake, changing the dream in her head. Fisk had grabbed her, he'd been about to kill her for what she'd done, and then his head had splattered, blood everywhere, all over her and her fridge and her kitchen, and Frank had appeared, dragged her back from the blood before she could trip in it, and she hadn't even had to tell him she couldn't stay in a blood soaked apartment, she hadn't needed to, he'd just whisked her off to-- But there, she'd struggled. She could imagine the smell of his bed - it'd smell just like him, the way he'd smelled when she'd hugged him, when she'd rested her forehead against his, slightly metallic and so very Frank, with not a lot of anything else layered on top - but she couldn't imagine where Frank would live when he wasn't being the Punisher, when he wasn't on the run, when he was just... a person.)

It turned out his apartment wasn't that different to hers. There was a bookcase lined with books she desperately wanted to examine and run her fingertips over the spines of each one, to figure out what kind of things Frank Castle - not the Punisher but Frank himself - read, what made his mind tick by. He had a big bed, long enough for his legs and wide enough for both of them had he stayed, and he had a sofa, and a kitchen. Everything was clean and tidy and it looked almost - _almost_ \- unlived in, as though he'd just moved in.

But there were tell-tale signs that he'd been there a while. There was a book on the bedside with a bookmark shoved in the middle, a couple of pairs of jeans slung over a chair, a basket of laundry (and it struck her as utterly bizarre to think of Frank doing _laundry_. She wanted to stick her nose in the basket and see what it smelled of, what kind of detergent he used. She wanted to run her hands over his whole life and find out what the man beneath the mask did when he wasn't punishing, what books he read when he was alone, what toothpaste kept his teeth white), and a few odds and ends that kept his apartment from being sterile and untouched.

He wasn't on the bed anymore and she'd rolled over as she slept, or he'd turned her and tucked her in, she had no memory of either. She couldn't think of many people she'd trust enough to come down in their bed, to be so utterly vulnerable.

She'd trust Frank. Foggy, but she'd never burden him with this, not when he was grieving too. She'd have trusted Kevin, but she'd never have let him in so close as to put the weight of her bad decisions on him. She'd always tried so hard not to do that. 

Matt.

She'd trust Matt not to take advantage of her, not to hurt her, but she couldn't imagine trusting him with the ugly side of her. She couldn't imagine a world where showing him the coke and heroin in her purse would result in a hair kiss she could still feel and the promise that she wasn't _alone_ , that she _had someone now_. Matt would check her into rehab, pay for it somehow, he'd make it _work_ , but she knew as she walked away to get clean she'd see the look on his face: disappointment. Hurt. She knew he'd judge her for being weak, for not being the cut and clean and dry and perfect Karen he thought she was, the Karen that'd never snorted a line or shot a man, the Karen who'd never _killed_ a man.

Of course, if Matt were alive she wouldn't be as fucked up as she was right now, so maybe it was a moot point.

Or, maybe, had something happened to Frank she would be in just the same position, but without the warm bed to lie in, without the kiss to her hair. 

She knew there were deal breakers. Matt would never be able to handle her like this, he'd never know how. He'd see it as weakness, a failure on his part if nothing else. He'd try to fix her, and then he'd be angry when she didn't mend. 

Foggy... She didn't know what Foggy's was, she didn't know if it was what she did to Wesley or if it was something more subtle, if it was making the choice to inject poison into her veins and not call him, if it was her decision to not talk to him about this at all.

Frank, she knew. She knew what his would be. _His_ would be Wesley. One day he'd find out what she did to him, that she put seven bullets in him just because she wanted to, because she was afraid and alone and so very angry about everything. One would've done it, one was self defense. Seven was malice.

Seven was a deal breaker. 

But somehow this, this ugly, messed up, _fucked up_ side of her wasn't, somehow this had resulted in her being tucked into bed and left to sleep until it wore off.

And oh, boy, was it wearing off.

She glanced up from the bed, eyes flicking between the three doors. One was an outside door, the other two were the contenders for the bathroom, and she was pretty sure the one on the left was where she needed to go.

She half-fell out of bed, scrambling along the floor, and it was only once she burst into the bathroom, already halfway to throwing up, that she realised Frank not being in the apartment meant he was in here.

"Whoa!" 

"Sorry, sorry!" She dropped to her knees on the floor by the toilet and threw up with such intensity she was surprised her stomach didn't come flopping out into the bowl.

"Hey, it's okay, hold on." She had her face in the toilet, so all she was aware of was the sound of fabric, a towel she thought, and a belt. She threw up again. 

"Sorry," she whimpered again.

He settled down on the floor next to her, his calloused fingers pulling her hair back off her face and bunching it up at the back of her neck. Now she was sobering, she was increasingly aware that her hair was _dirty_ , that he was touching hair she hadn't washed in days. Hadn't he offered her a shower the night before? Hadn't she said no? 

She wanted to care more about that, but she threw up again instead. 

A cool cloth pressed to the back of her neck and she dropped her forehead onto the toilet seat, closing her eyes and fighting off the desperate sobs she could feel building up in her chest. 

She was _not_ going to start sobbing on Frank Castle's bathroom floor having just barged in here to throw up in his toilet.

"I'll, uh, I'll cl-clean this," she muttered.

"Don't you dare," he grumbled and she felt him tie her hair back, although using what she had no idea. "Better?" Her put the same cool cloth to the back of her neck and between her shoulders and she shivered and nodded.

"S'good, yeah," she said. "Sorry."

"Gonna have to ban that word," he mused beside her. "Y'know, unless you figure out a good reason to use it."

"I think this is a great reason," she told the toilet bowl. He didn't reply to her, continuing to apply gentle pressure with the cool cloth, and she sniffled, more from the throwing up than the sobs she'd somehow managed to fight down. "Sorr--" He clicked his tongue. She made huffing noises. "Did I stop you showering or..."

"I just got done," he said. "Stop worrying so much." A moment passed, she could hear that he wasn't done, so she stayed quiet. "Thought you were still asleep or I would'a been there when you woke up."

"S'okay," she said. "Wasn't like I didn't know you were still..." Words were not functioning the way they were supposed to anymore. She couldn't focus or get her thoughts to line up neatly like they usually did, or perfectly like they did when she was high. 

"How're you feeling?" he said and she turned her face from the toilet bowl to look at him as though to ask _are you serious?_ He was a little scruffy, she noticed, stubble building up on his jaw, and his hair was longer than she was accustomed to, although not as long as it was when he was joking about being a hipster. He pulled a face at her, not quite a scowl but something close. "I kinda need a status report. This is all new terrain for me. Dunno what I'm expecting."

"I dunno, Frank." She shifted her position, leaned back against the wall next to the toilet. His bathroom was tiny, just a bath and shower combo, a toilet and a sink, all crushed into the same tiny area. She couldn't stretch her legs all the way out on the floor. "I dunno..."

She dragged her eyes up from the floor to try and focus on him. He'd pulled his pants on - at least, she assumed he hadn't been showering with them on, but she wouldn't put it past him - and he'd shrugged on a white vest, which she was willing to bet was the only thing he owned that wasn't black. 

It was a weird thing to have her thoughts loop on, but suddenly she wanted to go through his drawers, not to snoop but to see if he owned any other colours. Maybe he had a pink shirt tucked away for special occasions. That'd make her want to live to see one, that's for sure.

"Okay, okay," he said and stood up. He hadn't been touching her since she moved, but she felt colder anyway. He ran the tap, grabbed a glass from the shelf above the sink. She was only vaguely aware of what was going on, as though her world was blanketed in a thick fog. Her legs were connected, but she wasn't really _aware_ of them, even though she could see them. Her arms were just... there, a part of her but not quite attached. She somewhat wanted to lay her head down on the floor and just never lift it ever again, but that wasn't a new feeling, at least not recently.

"Okay, here." He came back down. She felt a little warmer, and he was closer this time, one arm bracing him against the toilet seat so he wouldn't fall and crush her as he put a cool glass of water to her lips.

She resisted. He made a tutting noise. She settled, drinking from the glass.

"Attagirl," he murmured, "thank you."

"Not your kid," she grumbled as soon as the glass wasn't muffling her. "Don't need to be treated like it."

"Oh, hell," he said, "you think I would've treated my kid like this? Come home high like this? Man, I would've--"

"Done exactly this," she said and flicked her gaze to his face. He met her eyes. "Anyway, I'm not high now, 'nfortunately."

"Well, then we've managed step one," he grumbled. "Step two is the withdrawal part, innit?"

"Last I heard." She tried to maneuver herself to just curl up on the floor, way too exhausted to move more than that.

"Wh-What are you-- Christ, Karen." Strong arms wrapped around her, hauling her up off the cold stone floor and into an embrace that was both new and familiar at the same time.

"Ngh, dun't..." she moaned, but he was already carrying her back through to the bed and setting her down in it. "I'm all dirty from your floor, just leave me to die, it's fine..."

"Jesus Christ," he muttered. "You gonna be like this the whole time?"

She planted her face in the pillow, sprawling with her arms and legs splayed like a starfish. It wasn't a deliberate decision to be pitiful, but it summed up how she was feeling on the inside. Plus, his bed was surprisingly comfortable. 

"I'll take that as a yeah." She felt him pull the covers out from under her, and she whined and complained in response, then tuck them back _over_ her, returning her to the warmth and comfort of his bed. "Gonna wake you in an hour with some more water."

"S'fine," she said, "I'll be throwing up again by then."

"Nice," he said, "I'll look forward to that."

She managed a laugh, if only just slightly, and curled into a little ball. She felt him tuck the covers over her, pressing them in under her shivering body, and then stroke her hair with a gentle hand.

"Gonna get you through this," he said, and she wasn't sure if he was really talking to _her_ at this point, or more to himself. Either way, she thought they both deserved the reassurance. "I'm here for you."

He started to move away and she grabbed his wrist, pulling his arm down to curl around it like a teddy bear, his fist under her chin, close to her throat. The bed dipped as he settled beside her, sitting with his arm just around her waist from the position. 

"I'm here with you," he corrected after a moment and she shook once from a sob she didn't quite manage to hold back. He murmured her name, kissed her hair, and she fell asleep before he ever moved away. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lord, I'm still loving writing this. Like, genuinely hyped to write. I haven't felt like that in a LONG time.

He woke Karen up a few times between five AM and ten AM, once an hour on the hour in fact. He didn't try to have her eat something, but he sat her up and made her drink a glass of water three times, and a caffeine free sports drink twice, muttering about electrolytes the whole time.

They didn't talk, aside from Karen muttering little complaints as he put glasses to her lips, and Frank murmuring, "Attagirl," every time she finished a glass. 

David showed up around quarter to eleven, no bags of groceries to be seen, and Frank put himself in the doorway so he couldn't come in, which visibly offended him right to his very core.

"I'm not going to-- What do you even think I'm going to do?" he said, ruffling up his curly hair which, somehow, was even more wild than it was when they were sharing a bunker. He tried to peek past Frank's shoulder, so he put his broad torso even more in his way to make sure he couldn't. 

"Just give her some space," he grunted and folded his arms. "What happened to the groceries?"

"They're in the trunk," David said and stomped his way back down the steps and over to his car. Frank followed, wedging the door so it wouldn't swing closed while he was outside and make him climb in through the window. "Did you not have groceries?" Frank just looked at him. "Christ, you're bad at this being a person thing." 

"Thanks." Frank opened his trunk and looked inside. "Looks good." He picked up a couple of bags and took them upstairs. David followed behind him with the third and forth and this time Frank let him come in and put them down on the kitchen island. He tried to peek past Frank at the bed, but Frank blocked his view. "Leave her 'lone."

"You don't seem like the kind to take in a junkie," David hissed at him.

"Took you in," Frank grumbled at him, "can't be worse than that."

"I have you know _I_ took _you_ in," David said. " _I_ had a home, you had a-- a-- knife or something!"

"Sledgehammer." Frank went back outside, grabbed the fifth bag, closed the trunk without letting it slam and came back in. David hadn't moved, because he knew better than to go against Frank's wishes the moment his back was turned. 

"Seriously," David said as he put the final bag down. He'd already started taking the chilled and frozen items out and putting them away, and Frank was grateful for that. It'd been so long he wasn't sure he knew what fit where anymore. "Why're you helping some kid not taking her to rehab?"

"I'm-- It's not some kid," Frank said and rested his fists on the island, back bent and head down. He lowered his voice so far even he couldn't hear it. "It's Karen."

"Ka-- Karen?! Like our Karen? Karen Page Karen? Daily Bulletin reporter Karen Page?" David hissed back at him, scurrying across to the other side of the island. " _Flowers in the window Karen?_ "

If he wasn't so deeply worried, if he wasn't busy fretting that Karen would overhear and get upset, if he wasn't _terrified_ he'd let her down and she'd go back, or die, or overdose, or _something_ , Frank would reply with something sarcastic like, _nah, Karen from the corner store_ , but instead he just nodded helplessly and looked across at the bed. She was asleep again, curled around his pillow, blonde hair thready and unwashed. 

"Jesus," David said, following his gaze. "What happened to her?"

"Life," Frank grunted. "Her, uh..." How to explain? He wasn't even sure of the details. "Her boyfriend died." 

David looked at him in surprise. "Again?"

"What?"

"Nothing." He went back to moving more things into the fridge. "Who was she...?"

"Some lawyer." Frank emptied one of the bags out onto the island and started putting items into the counters, the things he knew you definitely didn't need to chill. "Murdock."

"Oh, shit," David said, "that guy died? What happened?"

"It's a long story." Frank wasn't sure why he was protecting Matt's stupid secret identity (why he even had one of those, he didn't know) when he was dead, but he wasn't going to betray something he wasn't even supposed to know to begin with. He leaned against the counter, folded his arms across his chest and set his jaw. "Truth be told he was a fuckin' idiot."

"Nice to know you still speak ill of the dead," David said, "although it's definitely a change for you to be insulting someone else not us." He shut the fridge, pulled an entire fruit bowl out of one of the other bags and set it down. "I was right you didn't have one. The fuck're you living on?"

Frank shifted in front of the cupboard containing all his MREs. "Nothing."

David narrowed his eyes at him, but if he was tempted to root around, he didn't follow through. "So what's your plan here?"

"Get her clean," Frank said. "S'hoping you could do some research for me. And, uh..." David looked at him. Frank pulled a few faces. "Take care of her in a few days so I can go visit Curtis, get him to give me some advice."

"You could just call him," David said. "He'd come over?"

"Don't wanna put him out." Frank scratched at his elbow through his sweater.

"No, you don't want Karen to have to deal with more than one stranger at a time." David nodded. "Got it."

Frank moved around the kitchenette, over to the bed. He was careful not to make too much noise as he picked up her jeans where he'd left them the night before and retrieved the keys he'd found during his raid. He stepped back over to David. "Can you, uh..."

David took the keys. "What?"

Frank scratched at the back of his head. "I dunno what she's got in her apartment, but she's gonna wanna go back to it at some point, and if she's, uh, got stuff that I don't know about..."

"She could relapse. Right." David nodded and palmed the keys. 

"You know where she lives, right?" David gave him a look and Frank rolled his eyes. "Right." He gestured at the groceries. "How much do I uh..."

"It's fine, I got it," David said, "you can pay me back by bringing her over for dinner when she's clean. Bring potatoes or something, I don't care. Just... bring yourselves." He headed for the door and Frank followed behind him, leaning back in the doorway as David stepped out. "You know..." He looked around at Frank. "Guy I met tied me to a chair?" He shook his head. "Wouldn't've done this shit." He pointed through at the bed and Karen in it. "Would've just taken her to someone he thought would be better to look after her."

"Probably still should," Frank grumbled. "Gonna kick her ass when she's in the state to take it."

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that!" David hurried off down the stairs and Frank kept an eye on him until he was in his car, safe and pulling away, then he closed the door.

"Who was that?" 

He looked around and Karen was sitting up in bed again. She looked wrecked, sweaty and shivering, but she had enough awareness to be asking who was in the apartment, so he'd tag that as progress and move on.

"Lieberman." Frank ambled across to the kitchen. "How'd you feel about uh..." He hunted around in his brain for something he knew how to cook and came up pretty blank, his mind busy looping on a dozen different factors of Karen Page coming down from drugs in his bed. "Soup." He knew how to cook other things, he was sure of that, but fucked if he could remember any of them right now. 

"Like, soup in general?" she said, still shivering. Her teeth were chattering a little. "I'm soup positive."

"Soup it is." He started unloading the rest of the bags, finding the things he needed. "Can't promise it'll be good. Pretty much guaranteed to be shit." 

"S'fine," she said, "we can keep the good soup for when I can taste it."

He chuckled under his breath, glancing across at her. It was like she knew him, knew he could cook good soup when he wasn't so utterly preoccupied. He could go into battle right now, but he was screwed by the concept of anything domestic. "You ready for that shower yet?"

She hesitated. "Yeah." She slid to the edge of the bed and he kept one eye on her as he put out the things to make soup. He'd picked chicken breasts, some noodles and assorted vegetables. He wasn't sure it wasn't going to taste like trash, but he was positive neither of them were going to give a fuck. 

"Fuck!" She hit the floor the second she tried to stand up and he was at her side in a moment, reaching for her.

"Hey, hey, it's okay, you're okay." He helped her back onto the bed and it was only once she pushed him away that he realised she'd started crying. "Hey, no." He sat down next to her and she turned away, trying to hide her face and her tears. "Karen, c'mon." He put an arm around her, tried to ignore the little stab in the place his heart used to be at her pushing him away. "C'mon, it's me..."

She snuffled hard a couple of times, wiping at her nose and face and shook her head. "'m fine, I'll uh... shower later."

"Karen," he said again. 

"What?" It wasn't a snap, although he thought she might've tried to make it one, it was just this little pathetic whimper beneath her breath that broke his heart.

"It's _okay_ ," he said. "You don't have to be ashamed. You're, y'know, you're... fighting something a lot bigger than you. It's gonna whip your ass sometimes. You just gotta keep getting back up again after."

She didn't speak and he paused. "You're not ashamed of that."

"Of course I am," she whispered. "I'm fucking... horrified you have to see me like this, Frank." 

"Yeah, but you weren't pushing me away when you were throwin' up this morning," he said. "You pushed me away when you cried."

She shied instantly, which confirmed the fact he was right. "What? You think I'm gonna judge you for _crying?_ You think I don't cry?"

"I know you do," she mumbled. 

He sat quietly for a moment, letting the distance hang between them rather than getting bigger or smaller. They didn't lie to each other, they'd _never_ lied to each other. Everything he'd ever said to her was truth and she'd returned him the same. She'd broken across lines to get in his face, to make him _talk to her_ , and in all the time he'd been so wrapped up in his own bullshit, in his single-minded pursuit of vengeance, in his desperation to keep her safe and make sure that no one shot her or stabbed her or attacked her or killed her, he'd never _asked_. He'd never asked a simple question like _are you okay_ or _how are you handling the death of your boyfriend_ , and he'd never, not once, asked what brought a girl as bright-eyed and determined as Karen Page to his hospital bed to get in his face and wave a photo of his family at him. 

He'd never _asked_ what turned her into the woman sitting on the bed next to him, so afraid of letting him see her _cry_. 

"But I've seen you cry before," he muttered. He wasn't really talking _to_ her, more mulling it over as he tried to figure out what was making her tick this way. "So you're not ashamed of crying."

"Frank," she said. "Stop."

He frowned, but he didn't try to touch her or break the hold she had over herself. "Okay, well, if you don't take a shower today I'm gonna have to put you through one tomorrow, so, yeah." He got up off the bed and he didn't have to look around to know she was _watching him_ , tracking him with her eyes as he went back to cutting vegetables and trying to remember how the hell you make _soup_. 

They let silence fall over the apartment, occasionally broken by the sound of a knife against wood, or Frank muttering swearwords under his breath. 

"Do you have my phone?" she said after a minute. He peeked between the cupboard and the counter, across at the bed, and she looked back at him. 

"Why?" he said suspiciously.

"Because you probably still have a crap flip phone." She sounded exhausted, wrung out, her words slurring together slightly. "Mine's got internet. You can look up how to make soup. Sounds like you're having problems."

He pointed the knife at her. "I know how to make soup." It was just that his brain had vacated his head and left him with a big echoing black hole. It wasn't like he could personally go to the store and get the things he needed for the meals he knew how to cook, so here he was, stuck trying to figure out soup from what he had.

"Okay, how're you making soup then?" she said.

"Well, uh." He scratched at the back of his head. "I'm chopping the vegetables to go in the--"

"You got stock? Water? Butter?"

He put the knife down. "Pretty sure it's in your purse," he grumbled and ambled over to the sofa, picking it up and rooting through it. "Dunno your code."

"Probably do," she said. 

"Don't." He really didn't, so he thrust the phone out at her but she didn't take it. He stood there like an idiot, phone held out to her, while she stared at it blankly. "Kinda waiting here."

"Uh... Zero two, one two, one six," she said, rubbing at her nose and snuffling again. "Use the browser, new tab, it'll give you a search. Just... whatever you're trying to make, put it in there and it'll bring up a recipe." She dragged her legs back onto the bed, turned her back and curled in on herself.

He ran the numbers through his head. "December second twenty-sixteen?" 

A brief hesitation. "No."

He tapped the numbers in and her phone lit up. "You've got messages."

She looked around at him. "Who...?"

"Uhh..." He thumbed through the texts, not reading them but checking the names. "Five from Ellison. Couple names I don't recognise... Rebecca? Sidney?" 

"Sources," she muttered into his pillow. 

He eyed the top of the list. "Sixty-seven from Foggy."

"Christ." She rolled back onto her face. "Oh, god." She rolled back and sat up, reaching for the phone. "Fuck. Christ. Shit."

He raised an eyebrow at her and offered the phone out. She took it, fingers shaking, and he watched her fight with it as she tried to write out a response. "Want help?"

"No." She shook her head, rubbed at her nose. He wondered if it was irritating from the cocaine she'd snorted. He wondered if that's why she always sounded just a little nasally. She looked up. "Saucepan."

"Right." He trekked off back to his kitchen, rooting around. He didn't have utensils, or pans. He was using his combat knife to cut the vegetables. "Uh." He turned around, emptied out the other bags. Pots and pans clattered out across the island.

"He knows you well," Karen muttered from the bed.

"Yeah, yeah." Frank found and washed out a saucepan, mostly for Karen's benefit, and glanced across at her where she was still fighting her phone. "He worried 'bout you?"

"Yeah." She shivered from head to toe and he wanted to wrap her in another blanket, but he didn't. 

"Does he know? Have any clue at all?" he said.

"That I'm in the Punisher's apartment? No," she said.

He looked past the countertop at her and she looked right back at him. 

"No," she said after a moment. "I told him I'm in Vermont." She held the phone out to him. "It won't turn off, you can use the browser."

He stepped over, took the phone from her. "Vermont?" he said and prodded at it, feeling like he had sausages for fingers as he tried to put what he wanted into the browser for a recipe. 

"Yeah." He looked at her and she sighed. "S'where I grew up." She lay back on the bed, hands on her stomach, eyes up at the ceiling. 

"Really?" he said in surprise. "Always figured you for a New Yorker."

"Well, you figured wrong."

He didn't comment on her tone, or the way she edged just lightly into being almost mean. He set the phone down on the side, screen on and recipe displayed, and started working on the soup again, zoning off into instructions, into being told what to do, if only by a recipe on her phone.

When he looked across at the bed, she was curled up on herself, seemingly asleep again.

A text popped up on the screen, just reading, _Oh okay! Say hi to Mr Page for me :)_ and Frank snorted. 

She didn't lie to him, but she sure didn't seem to have an issue lying to everyone else. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Question for the masses! If I was to publish chapters a couple times a week instead of at random like this (oop), what days would be your preference? Do you have a preference? Let me know! I might just keep publishing whenever as I want to keep up with this and not let it lag behind or go a long time without updates, but I also need to keep writing my original work (I got my first patron for my original work! I'm so thrilled) as, you know, money and life and it'd be nice to be able to afford a nice Kastle shirt off redbubble as well as, like, to live, okay?
> 
> Anyway! Let me know.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have much to say about this chapter, just that I so, so appreciate all the lovely comments I've been getting on this fic so far. Thank you so much. ♥♥
> 
> Be aware that the rating's gonna rise slightly (M) in the next couple of chapters because Karen's in a dark place. There's also going to be some talk of suicidal thoughts, and some focus on needles and the actual use of drugs. If that bothers you, I totally understand if you have to get off this ride now ♥ but I hope you can all stick around for the journey. 
> 
> (Eventually, EVENTUALLY (note the "slow burn" tag), I'm hoping it might rise to an E. But I'm not sure about that yet.)

He woke her with soup, sitting by her on the bed with a tray in his lap and two bowls sitting on it. "Hey."

She sat up and he didn't go out of his way to help her, ready to assist if she needed it but unwilling to damage her pride any more than it was already battered.

"Smells good," she said and he considered making a joke about her suddenly taking up lying to him, but he changed his mind. 

"Ready for it?" he said and she nodded, getting comfy against the wall and letting him put the tray in her lap. He was willing to bet she had no real appetite, but she was making an effort, and that meant a lot to him. 

"So... what do you... do...?" she said as she took the first slurp of soup, pulling a face when it was too hot, then resting her spoon against the bowl. 

"Do?" He looked at her quizzically. 

"Do you have a job?" She frowned at him. "Frank Castle, road sweeper."

"Hilarious." He shook his head. "No, uh, David set me up with some cash, I've been... bummin' around a bit, figuring out my next move."

She laughed softly, trying for another spoonful of soup. She managed this one, swallowing it down, then wiped her bottom lip with her thumb. "What've you got planned?"

He paused. "Oh, you know me. Big plans. Huge plans. Got plans coming out of my ears."

"Not a clue huh?" she said.

"Nada." He shrugged. "I'll figure somethin' out. Last time I was, uh, workin' construction. Paid the bills, sorta. Didn't really end well though."

"Construc--" She paused, spoon nearly to her mouth again, and gave him a sidelong glance. "I read about... there was a weird incident with Little Italy and--"

"Yeah."

"Jesus, Frank." She turned her attention back to the soup and for a few minutes they ate quietly, neither one speaking. He kept an eye on her, making sure the soup was going down as well as he hoped. 

"So, break it to me," he said after a moment, "how bad's the soup?"

"Can't taste much," she said, "but what I can is... actually pretty good." She offered him a crooked smile. "Thanks."

"Yeah." He went back to his own, one eye keeping watch over the bouncing of her ankle and the jiggling of her knee. She wanted drugs, he could tell that, but it seemed she hadn't reached the point yet where the withdrawal was overruling the part of her mind that wanted to _stop_. 

He had no idea how he was going to handle that when the time came. 

"Thanks for letting me eat in your bed," she mumbled.

"Don't get used to it," he said gruffly. "Gonna have you eating at the table and showering soon enough."

She cut her eyes across to him. "Did I dream you threatening to shower me?"

"Nope." He pushed what was left of his soup around the bowl. 

"Huh." She went back to eating and he did the same, fixating on one chunk of chicken that was sitting at the edge of his bowl. 

When she'd finished eating, he took the tray from her and put it on the side table, then offered out a cup of hot tea, the bags of which he'd found in with the groceries. She murmured thanks and sipped and he sat quiet for a moment before saying, "Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah." She rested her cup against her bottom lip and he didn't speak. "Frank?"

"Right." He scratched at the back of his neck, shifted one foot against the other where they hung slightly off the edge of the bed, black socks on both and shoes tucked by the door. "Uh. I guess I want to know if--if he'd had what you wanted, the uh--"

"Coke?"

He felt sick and was suddenly regretting eating the soup he'd made. "Right." A pause. "I just... if he hadn't given you, uh..."

"Heroin."

"Jesus Christ."

"Yeah."

He scratched at his hair. "If you were still just on the coke, would you've called?"

"No."

He felt his stomach drop, his heart pounding in his chest, heard the blood rush past his ears. He was used to punching or hitting or shooting when this happened, and he couldn't do that here, so instead he fidgeted, rubbed the heel of his hand against his knee, shook his head back and forth, smacked his lips. "W--Why?" he finally choked out.

For what felt like a long few minutes, but could only have been thirty seconds at the outside, Karen didn't speak. He didn't think she was going to. The quiet trust, the bond between them that promised no lies meant sometimes they just had to be silent, when they couldn't tell the truth. He opened his mouth to say it was okay, but her voice broke the silence first.

"I thought I had it handled," she said, blunt fingernails picking at a smear on the side of his cup. "I, uh... I was just so fucking... miserable, you know? I... I kept going over it all in my head over and over, everything that... that'd happened, all the..." She tore the little paper strip from the string that hung over the side of the cup, tore it a few times, and he found himself entranced, watching her fingers rip and tear at the label, imagining them ripping and tearing at him like he was feeling inside. "You know, uh, we were dating? Sort of. Kind of..." Another little rip in the paper. "He seemed to really... but then there was this other girl and I thought... but all he ever did was lie. He wasn't feeling--" If Red wasn't already dead, Frank would kill him. 

"It wasn't right," she said, "I know that. We-- He'd never understand me. He didn't... trust me. It wasn't right, it was a fantasy. But..." Her knee jiggled and her fingernails scraped against the cup. "It was a nice one, y'know? It..." He could hear her getting tearful again, so he didn't speak or touch her. "It was a nice thought, a guy like that liking a girl like me. He's so good, you know?" She looked around at him and rubbed at her nose some more. "He'd never..." She sniffled and looked back down at the cup. "It wasn't that, that uh... Nah, it wasn't that. It didn't break me. I know that I'm not... I could never have been _honest_ with him, and I... I need that. I don't... I need it."

He pulled one foot up, bending his knee, resting his hands on it. He didn't say anything. This was the most Karen had ever talked to him like this, him listening, focusing on _her_ issues, on _her_ hurts and _her_ problems. He owed her so much patience. Whatever this quiet little moment was, he wasn't going to ruin it.

"He, uh... He was with her? When he..." She rubbed at the back of her neck. "And I started wondering, after he was gone. I... I was so convinced he was alive, so _sure_ he was out there, so I kept his apartment paid up so it'd be there when he got back. I nearly moved into it just to keep it, and then the more he wasn't there, the more he didn't show up, the more I started wondering-- Well, wondering if he was alive and so was she and they just... didn't call."

"You think he's out there and just not telling you he's alive?" Frank said, breaking the silence. He couldn't imagine ever doing that to her, letting her believe he was dead for longer than absolutely necessary. He'd always find a way to let her know he was okay, he just _would_. 

"I can't seem to convince myself he's dead," she said. "Dead's almost easier, you know?" She rubbed at her nose some more. He recognised it as her way of trying not to cry. "Dead's out of his control. Dead's... Dead's _dead_. Alive but just not contacting us - me, Foggy - it's a choice. It's a choice being made because we're not _worth it_."

 _We_ , she said. _I_ , he heard.

"You're worth it," he said firmly. "Is that why you..."

"Used?" She shrugged. "Got all in my head. After dad... He didn't want me either. If he'd just-- But he didn't." She rested her head back against the wall. "Family's supposed to be there, but I wasn't worth it then either. I kept having these nightmares, and I kept... I just wanted the pain to _stop_."

He couldn't understand turning to drugs, he wasn't sure he ever would, but he could understand that. He could understand the desperate need for pain to stop, the kind of pain that wasn't physical, the kind that burned in his chest until he felt hollowed out and left for dead. He turned to violence, to rage and hatred and vengeance. Karen didn't have that. She felt alone, left alone and abandoned by the people who were supposed to love her, and so she'd turned to her vice. His was blood, hers was this.

"I get it," he muttered. "But it won't stop it. It'll just..." He looked across at her phone where it lay on the counter. "You lost Murdock, but Nelson? He gives one hell of a shit about you. You're pushing him out. That won't stop the pain, it'll just make it worse in the end."

She didn't reply, leg jiggling, fingernails scraping against the cup she held so tightly between her hands. 

"So, uh," he said, scratching at his scalp some more. "Been wondering about this since you mentioned him. Who the fuck is Todd?"

She let out a laugh that surprised him, and shook her head. "He was my boyfriend in college." She paused. "Mm, not really in college. College-age."

"So he was your not-college boyfriend," he said.

"We dated for a couple of years around that time, yeah," she said. "It was... intense. It was always intense with him. I used to--" She broke off, shame passing over her face, and he weighed his options, wondering if he should offer up some kind of shameful admission in return or just wait. "I used to go to college parties, deal drugs for him."

Not what he was expecting. "Jesus, Karen."

"I was desperate for money," she said, "I'd bring a cash influx back to my dad."

He put a few pieces together in his head, that she was desperately trying to hold together her family at, what, eighteen years old? To the point she was dealing drugs to make the money, and somehow her father had refused to let her go home?

He vaguely wanted to meet this guy and introduce his face to a table, but he knew better than to lift a hand against someone Karen cared about. 

"This Todd guy got you doing _and_ dealing?" he said.

She pulled a face. "When you put it like that, it sounds pretty bad, yeah."

"Yeah, yeah it... does." He sipped his own tea, unsure if he liked it or not, and watched his socks. "At least you dumped him." He paused. "And shot him."

She made a little sound, somewhere between laughter and a sob, and he looked across at her, trying to figure out what was going on in her head. 

"Hey, hey," he murmured and his arm twitched as he wanted to put it around her again. She waved that off, wiping under her eyes and shaking her head.

"I'm good, I'm fine," she said. 

He lowered his arm back down the couple of inches it'd risen and swung his legs off the bed. "Want anything else to eat? Think David brought some sweet stuff. I saw him put ice cream in the freezer, I think. I guess it might've been something else."

"I'm fine," she said. He gathered up their empty bowls, his empty cup, and the tray, and took them across to the sink, putting them down. He felt her watching him but he didn't look away, keeping his focus on what he was doing as he washed up. 

"Are you disappointed in me?" she said and he frowned, looking across at her. 

"What're you on about?" he grumbled, setting his tea towel aside and turning towards her. "Disappointed in you? _Me?_ "

She shrugged, not looking at him. He kept his gaze fixed on her. She was picking at her fingernails, knee jiggling about. 

He sighed and softened. "No, I'm... No." He moved across, sat on the bottom corner of the bed and looked at her. "I'm not disappointed in you. Worried sick, yeah. Confused over how this could happen. But not... Not _disappointed_. I'm not disappointed in you. Why would you think that?"

"I'm disappointed in me."

It turned out he still had a heart somewhere in his rib cage, because he felt it shatter, but before he could figure out what to say she'd carried on with, "Some of the worst things in my life happened because I was h-high." She rubbed at her nose, picked at the covers. She'd put her cup aside. "It was my fault and I still... went back to..."

"I don't believe that," he said gruffly. "You take a lotta blame onto yourself. Makes it hard for me to believe anything was really your fault."

She made a little snorting, sobbing sound under her breath and shook her head. "It was though, Frank."

"Yeah, well, so was my family then," he said. "If I hadn't come home, if I'd been more _aware_ of what was going on, if I'd seen it coming..."

"You didn't know," she said. "That doesn't make it your fault."

He shrugged. "Well, we'll always disagree on that," he said. "Same as I'm gonna disagree with you that whatever happened to you was your fault. Until you convince me different, o'course." That'd require her letting him in, though. It'd mean her _telling him_ what happened, explaining her past. 

He wasn't surprised when she neither did that nor spoke at all. 

"A'right," he murmured and got back to his feet. 

"I'm tired," she said quietly, voice cracking. "I'm so tired."

"Get some more sleep," he said. "I'll wake you up in a while, when the food's workin'. Help you shower and stuff. It's gonna get worse from here, so... better to get the shower done now, while you can."

She hesitated a little, then nodded, dragging his pillow back into her arms. "Don't... let me get in your way," she said quietly. "I don't want to be--"

"Whatever it is," he said, "whatever you're about to say, just don't. You're not that, not any of those things rattling around in that head of yours." He turned back to washing up. "Just rest. Let's get you through this, then we'll... figure out where we go from there."

If she replied, it was too soft for him to hear, and when he looked across she was curled up around his pillow, face tucked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> >me, getting up today: OKAY! I'm going to come downstairs and work on my original things and my art.  
> >my brain: we could write fic  
> >me: i mean i guESS!!
> 
> (this is on, like, 16k already, what is happening in my life, I started this on the 1st? WHY WASNT NANOWRIMO THIS EASY)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incoming small essay about Frank's characterisation here, feel free to skip right past this. (Ctrl+F "end essay" if you like :) )
> 
> I realise Frank thinks about Karen in terms of his daughter a lot, but it's not like "she's like a daughter to me!" it's more this protective "how do I treat her right when she's in this state, okay well how would I treat Lisa?" feeling because to him there's no one on the planet he'd treat with more care than his daughter (not even Maria). He also thinks about Karen's dad a lot and the fact he's not there for her, she can't go back home, which to Frank is the highest crime imaginable because WHO TURNS THEIR DAUGHTER AWAY WHEN SHE NEEDS THEM??? Frank just can't get his head around that.
> 
> So he's stuck in this weird fuzzy middle where he sees Karen in somewhat Maria-like terms, in that she's the closest thing he has, or could imagine having, to some kind of relationship (intimacy! trust! bonding!), but he also sees that she's needy and he has to figure out how the fuck to look after her so that slots her into a kind of daughtery place where seeing her in that way makes it far easier for him to treat her the way he thinks she needs to be treated (Maria he'd probably yell at for being an idiot, for example, but now he's a brutal monster who murders people he's less likely to give into those desires around someone he sees as fragile, so he turns to his instincts with Lisa, who he'd gather close and protect and that's clearly what Karen needs right now), and also he's playing nursemaid so he's also stuck in a carer-like position and he's just "??????????" at life.
> 
> Which I think is pretty relatable.
> 
> Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is he's trying to relate his current situation against prior life experiences through a haze of "I don't know how to handle anything that isn't gunfire" and the brain damage he's received MULTIPLE TIMES.
> 
> That's also something I'm trying to lean into a little? Frank is canonically brain damaged (he got shot in the head, but survived it, not to mention getting shot in the side of his head later on, and the sheer numbers of BEATINGS he took to his face/head), and I think Jon's (amazing!) performance, especially in The Punisher, really highlights that. 
> 
> His brain damage seems to manifest strongly in the social:   
> \- he struggles with certain social cues  
> \- his words don't always line up the way he's trying to get them to  
> \- he ends up staring off into space, not making eye contact, and stammering until he gets his thoughts together  
> \- he also does this odd head swinging thing when he's trying to sort through his process, but only in social situations
> 
> You can see that in this gif here https://66.media.tumblr.com/f95d29867fc60587c2b4a21a3763fd76/tumblr_pirrspMEOc1wqbploo1_250.gif (source: frankcastle on tumblr) where his battle instincts are rearing up but the current situation calls for SOCIAL so he starts moving his head strangely as he tries to figure out the right responses and how to express through words to Micro what he needs him to understand.
> 
> You can also see it in the comparison between him greeting Karen on the bridge and in him greeting Maria at the park (https://jewishkarenpage.tumblr.com/post/180315131284/i-want-there-to-be-an-after-for-you), which is the first time I properly noticed how Jon is playing those two scenes. In the first, with Maria, he knows exactly what he's doing. He has social confidence, he strides up and speaks. His head and body are steady, he keeps eye contact (even behind his glasses) and most of the movement is camera movement. When he greets Karen, his head is moving, his body is rocking slightly. He rocks in the elevator scene too, and when he's having to resort to social to Lewis to try and get him to let Karen go. Compare THAT against when he comes into the kitchen and gets Karen to shoot him - any conversation then is a cover, a ploy, it's all battle and all instinct. 
> 
> The second he goes into a battle situation he goes back to young!Frank, who knows EXACTLY what he's doing, and even his words agree there. It's like battle instinct kicks in.
> 
> You can compare his struggles with words (and feelings, but primarily words) when he's talking to Karen (especially in the bridge scene), against his flashbacks to Maria (dreams, but also the flashback with Billy in the last episode), and the way Jon plays Frank in those two scenes.
> 
> Anyway, I'm trying to lean into it because his brain damage doesn't in any way make him unable to conduct himself, but I find it's a big part of his character, especially in TP. 
> 
> I was going to leave this until tomorrow to post but then I wrote this essay into the notes so... guess I'm posting it now so I don't lose my essay! I apologise for 800 words of Frank essay. 
> 
> END ESSAY.

At nine the next morning, Karen still fast asleep, he called David.

"At least I was awake this time," David complained, and Frank wasn't really buying it. He could hear sheets rustling. He-- Oh. He'd interrupted something else.

He resisted the urge to start laughing, lips twitching like crazy, and gruffly said, "Sorry 'bout that."

"No you're not," David grumbled.

"Did you go to Karen's apartment yesterday?"

David huffed and puffed a few times, probably sitting up and getting comfortable. "Yeah. She had a lot of shit, Frank. I cleaned it up as best I could. Think I found all the hiding places, I checked the toilet, shower shelves, inside bottles and jars, up inside cabinets. I did a Google search and everything, _where do addicts hide their stash_ and, like I say, I think I got everything."

Frank nodded a few times, head bobbing, and he figured David could probably just _sense_ him nodding because he said, "Also, I called Curtis for you. Didn't tell him much, but I said you needed some information on drug addiction, cocaine primarily, and that you'd be by to ask for information this week. Figured it'd help him to get his stuff in order for you."

"He doesn't think it's for me, right?" Frank grumbled.

"No, he probably thinks it's for me at this point." David went quiet a moment. "How's she doing?"

"Bad," Frank grumbled, "but I'll get her through it. Can you come over this afternoon? Sit with her?"

"Yeah, what time?" 

Frank looked across at Karen. He'd need to put her through a shower, for her sake, make sure she washed her hair and got clean and tidy so she wasn't embarrassed. "Three? I can swing by Curt right after."

"I'll be there," David said. "Anything you want me to bring?"

"Clothes from her place," Frank said after a moment. "She's only got one change of clothes here, so... bring some of her clothes, y'know, stuff she needs." He paused. She'd have to use his bathroom things today, but... "Shower stuff, too. If she's got a book half read, that."

"Anything _else_?" David said.

"Your sparkling personality." Frank hung up on him.

***

He spent the next few hours tidying up from the night before. He added Karen's clothes, which he suspected probably had bits of coke and who knows what else clinging to it, to his laundry basket, muttering to himself that he'd do that on the way back from seeing Curtis, and put away the half-bags of vegetables and things he hadn't tucked aside that morning. 

She'd slept most of the previous day and they hadn't talked much since their last heavy chat. He'd kept an eye on her, staying awake on the sofa and listening to her whimper in her sleep. He'd considered waking her, worried she was nightmaring, but somehow being awake seemed harder on her right now, so he just let her sleep.

Around eleven thirty he made breakfast, fruit and yogurt from one of the cartons he'd found in the fridge. It was strawberry cheesecake flavoured, apparently, Greek with probiotics. He spent a few minutes trying to decide between that one, the cherry, and the blueberry, realising he had absolutely no idea what her preferences were. Did she like fruit yogurt? Would she have preferred toffee flavoured or honey maybe? Did she like it crunchy? He only really knew how she took her coffee, and even that was questionable. He'd ordered black and she'd had some too, but that didn't mean she didn't usually add something to it. They'd both been distracted that day.

He'd told her to hold onto Matt Murdock, to not let go. So what if he broke people? Love was more important, right?

Did he do this to her by not telling her to run?

He'd been so desperate to _feel_ something again, to be close to someone who could tear his heart out and stamp on it, he threw her right into the line of fire, right into Matt god damn Murdock's waiting arms and all he'd done was--

She'd said at the time, he was the kind of man who hurt people. _Broke_ people. 

She'd gotten out, backed away, gotten him out of her life and Frank-- Christ. Frank had sent her right back in because of his own issues and now, now look where they were. He'd broken her. 

And Frank had lined her up for it. 

He slammed the fridge door shut, immediately wincing because he might have woken her. He checked across, but she was still asleep, burrowed into his pillow.

He spooned yogurt out into a bowl. 

If his daughter, his little Lisa, if she'd made it as far as being a teenager, if she'd come home and said she'd had her heart broken by a guy like Murdock, a guy that _broke people_ and _hurt people_... would he have sent her right back in for more?

No way.

So why did he approach Karen so god damn differently? Enough that he set her up for this? 

She wasn't his daughter, or his kid in any way, he didn't see her like that, but that didn't mean she wasn't still someone he wanted to protect, someone he should've treated with a lot more care. 

He looked across at her, watching her sleep so fitfully, clinging to his pillow like a lifeline, and then closed his eyes.

He'd given her different advice because somewhere in his head, he'd compared Murdock to Maria. Somewhere in his fucked up head, the one that hadn't quite made it out of all the shit he'd been through intact, he'd seen Murdock as the kind of guy who got inside you and fucked you up but at the end of the day was _there in the trenches with you_. He'd seen him as someone who was probably as messed up and hurting over Karen turning her back as she was over whatever it was he'd done to hurt her to begin with. 

Did Murdock even know? Did he _know_ what he'd done to her? Did he have a clue? 

He shook his head, trying to clear it. Of course Murdock didn't know, he was busy being _dead_. 

"Shouldn't speak ill of the dead," he muttered under his breath, "but I'll make an exception for you." 

He'd served yogurt out for himself, not just Karen, and he eyed the two bowls, suddenly not wanting to eat at all, but he couldn't make her eat and not eat himself so he pulled a variety of faces and shoved the spoons into the bowl moodily. He served out some fruit into another bowl, figuring she probably didn't want to choke down oatmeal or toast, and made another two teas. 

He didn't want to wake her, but he wasn't sure if that was more because of the guilt that was sitting heavy in his stomach, or the fact she always seemed worse every time he woke her up.

"Ah, hell," he muttered and piled the items onto a tray, bringing it across and setting it down on the bedside table. 

He put one knee on the bed, leaning over to touch her shoulder. "Hey..."

She jerked awake with a choked little noise that sounded like, "Kevin," and he pulled his hand back instantly, frowning down at her. She rubbed at her eyes, turned over a little to look up at him, and she settled, softening at the sight of his face. Hers was red around the eyes, pale and flushed at the same time, but she seemed happy to see him. "Frank." She smiled, just a little bit, and he smiled back the same.

"I made breakfast," he said. "Sorta." He climbed onto the bed next to her, one leg folded beneath himself and the other hanging off the side. "Sit up, yeah?"

She struggled her way upright, every movement sluggish and delayed, and he kept a sharp eye on her, ready to assist if she really needed it. They sat back up by the headboard again and she didn't complain when he put the tray in her lap with her two bowls. The cups he left on the bedside. 

"David has good taste in yogurt," she said as she ate. He gave her a sidelong look of amusement and she hid a smirk behind her spoon. 

"You seem to be feeling better," he said. 

"Just tired," she murmured, "and hungry." She scraped the yogurt from the bowl, licking her spoon clean, and moved onto the fruit. 

"I can make something else?" he said.

She shook her head. "S'okay." 

He wanted to ask who Kevin was, but he kept his mouth shut instead, choking down his own serving of yogurt and keeping one eye on her as she ate. 

"So, uh," he said once she was done and her cup of tea was in her pale hands, "David's gonna come by about three, he'll just hang out and keep you company while I go see a friend. He's gonna bring some of your stuff over too."

She paused, lowering the cup from her mouth and looking across at him. "How's he getting my stuff?"

_Oof_. He pulled a face. "Uh, well," he said, "I gave him your apartment key so he could go in and, y'know, check it out for... stuff. Figured since he has your key anyway you could do with a change of clothes." He hadn't brought up that she still wasn't wearing pants, or that she was wearing the same shirt she'd been wearing the day before, sweating into it. He didn't much care about smell, but he had a feeling if she figured out she wasn't smelling rosy she'd probably have a problem with that.

She sipped her tea a little, then drank a little faster, like she was suddenly figuring out she was thirsty. "If you trust him, I do," she said and lowered the tea. She hesitated. "Matt's stuff--"

"If he saw anything, he didn't mention it," he said. "He's good at secret keeping, anyway."

"Guess it doesn't matter now," she said. She looked over at him. "How'd you know..."

"Wasn't hard to figure out once I started thinkin' 'bout it long enough," he said with a shrug. "You three, you, Murdock, Nelson, you were all mixed up with the Fisk thing, and my thing." He sipped his own tea. "It was either him or Nelson, but what with the mask..." He put a hand over his eyes to demonstrate. "Wasn't hard to figure out."

"Yeah, he's... not that subtle," she said and fiddled with the teabag. "Still took me forever to figure it out. Thought he was just an alcoholic."

Frank paused, looking across at her. "That must've been..." He wasn't sure of what words he was looking for. He had questions, a million of them, but he settled on, "That must've been killer."

"Yeah." She sipped her tea some more. "I wanted to help him, but he didn't..." 

"He didn't need your help," Frank filled in gently. "He was off beating people up, when you thought he had a problem you could relate to."

She was quiet a moment. "I was an idiot," she said. 

"No, you weren't--"

"I was." She kept her gaze fixed on the cup. "Even you figured it out." 

"I figured it out because he was always around Nelson and you. You didn't have that clarity," he said, "you didn't see it from the outside."

"Yeah, well, I should've known, not been b-backstabbed, like a god damn idiot," she said and buried her face in her cup.

He stayed silent for a minute, sipping his own tea, working his words out ahead of time so as not to let his fucked up head have him speak wrong. "I ever tell you 'bout Billy?"

She shook her head. "No. Who's that?"

"He, ehh..." He lifted and dunked, lifted and dunked his teabag absently. "We met when we were in the Marine Corps, y'know, two guys out on deployment. We were in Kandahar together." He could feel Karen's eyes on him but he didn't look at her this time. "He became my brother, y'know? He didn't have family of his own, his mother was--" He broke off, reconsidered his words. "She dropped him when he was a baby, so he didn't have anyone, but he had me. Us. He used to come back with me when I went home. He and Maria were tight, and, ahh, Frankie, he..." He shook his head, smiling a little. "He loved that guy. Uncle Billy was his favourite person, sometimes I felt like he was happier to see Bill than he was to see me."

"I doubt that," Karen said softly.

He shook his head. "Nah, he got to see me all the time when I was there, but Bill was a treat, 'cause he was off at bars, picking up women, y'know, so I was at home with them and when Billy came by it was an extra bonus for Frankie. Lisa, though, Lisa... she'd always call Bill on his bullshit, eh? Frankie was always blown away by how cool he was but nah, not Lis. Lisa knew he was full of shit."

Karen didn't speak, drinking her tea and just listening. 

"Turns _out_ ," he said, "Billy knew when the hit was going down on my family."

He felt the muscles tense in every inch of Karen's body beside him, and out of the corner of his eye he saw her lower her cup to her lap. "Jesus."

"He was involved in the whole thing." He gestured weakly with his hand, trying to seem less fucked up over it than he felt inside, less like a man who'd had nightmares night after night of Billy putting bullets in the heads of everyone he loved, including Karen. "He was running drugs in Kandahar, he was working with Schoonover, hell he was practically in Agent Orange's damn lap the whole time and me? Me? I never knew. I never saw it. David, he asked if I trusted Bill, and I said he was family, I said he was the closest thing I had left to _family_ , and nah, nah it turns out he wasn't. Turns out he wasn't shit on my shoe. You know what he did the first chance he got? He shot me. I didn't see it comin', I was so busy with Madani I didn't see it _comin'_ , I didn't know, I didn't know until he showed his hand. You think you're stupid? Stupid for not knowing the blind guy you're in love with was also a masked vigilante? You ain't _know_ stupid."

"He dead?" she said.

"Close enough for me." He stuck his nose in his cup to not have to look at her or himself, to not have to acknowledge the heavy beating of his heart. 

"Good," she said.

He looked over at her finally, knowing that surprise was probably all over his face. "Yeah?"

"Whatever you did to him, Frank," she said, "he deserved every bit. For what he did to you, your family, all of it. He deserved it."

He put his empty cup on the beside table and rested his hands in his lap. She hadn't finished off her fruit yet, but that was okay, he had a feeling it was distraction rather than lack of appetite right now. "So, uh... what did Todd do?"

She looked at him questioningly and he realised that'd come further out of left field for her than it had for him. "You said, night I picked you up, you said that you'd shot him. First guy, 'pparently?"

"He beat up my brother." There was more to it, it was written all over her face, but he didn't press. "He was beating him, so I grabbed his gun from his trunk and I shot him."

He almost wanted to laugh. "How old were you?"

"Nineteen."

"Huh." He offered her a crooked smile, something warm in his chest. "Always been a tough bitch, haven't you?"

She laughed, soft and sweet, and brushed her dirty hair behind her ear. "Not feeling that description so much today." 

"I still see it," he said gently.

She smiled a little. "Thanks for breakfast," she said. "When, uh... You said David's coming over at... three? I... don't know what time it is."

He reached around, pulling the clock into view by the tray for her. "'bout noon," he said. "So we've got three hours to get you cleaned up."

"Frank, I dunno if I can shower, I've barely even been able to walk to the bathroom..."

It was true, the few times she'd woken up needing to go, he'd had to support her, one arm around her waist until he got her as far as the sink, then he'd pulled the door closed and stood outside, listening to the sound of her snuffling and crying, probably from embarrassment at her situation. She'd call out when she'd washed her hands and he'd help her back to bed.

"How about a bath?" he said. "I can run it hot for you, all you gotta do is get in and out of it." She was still hesitating. "I'll even wash your hair for you. You can, uh... strip down to your underwear for the bath and I'll not look, I'll wash your hair and then you can soak a little while, and I'll change the bed, and, yeah. You'll feel better for it."

_That_ got her attention, but she was blushing. "Frank, I don't--"

"You already ran in on me in the shower," he mused. 

Her eyes widened and she buried her face in her hands and for a second he thought he'd misjudged, that he'd fucked up completely and he should not have been allowed to speak. Then he realised she was _laughing_. 

"Mm, okay," he said, "glad you find that amusing."

"No, oh my god, Frank." She laughed more, flapping a hand across at him. "I can't believe I did that! I'm so sorry!"

"Bah," he said, still smiling, his chest extra warm now that she was _laughing_ again, even if it was only a start. "It's fine, y'know, Marine Corps, I'm not accustomed to privacy exactly, so."

She laughed again, edging into hysterical, and the warmth dissipated back into _concern_. "God. I'm-- I'm such a mess."

"You're fine," he grumbled. "Should see me when I've just had my ass kicked. You, uh, y'know David had to carry me outta a battlefield 'n all? Stuck me in his car, IV, called Curtis. I was outta it for... whew. Dunno how long." He shrugged. "Wasn't like I was gettin' to the bathroom just fine on my own then, either."

A strange look crossed her face, quickly wiped away, and he didn't press the issue, as the next words out of her mouth were, "Okay. Okay, hair wash and bath."

"All right," he said. "I'll go run it, yeah?" 

"Yeah," she said softly. "Okay."

"Okay." He kept smiling at her, hoping it came across as encouraging and fond rather than scary and like the Punisher was about to murder her, and gathered their items up, taking the empty cups and bowls (when had she finished off the fruit? Oh well, at least she'd eaten) across to the sink and setting them down for washing later. "Gonna have to use my shampoo, that all right?" he said, looking across at her.

"Yeah," she replied, smiling right back at him. "That sounds just fine."

He nodded and headed off to run the bath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear, half of writing this is just research. I have so many tabs up, and that's just for remembering how Billy and Frank know each other or where Karen got the gun from. It's a big fun adventure into continuity and if I've gotten anything wrong I'm sorry! I'm trying my best. I'm gonna have to draw up a timeline once we get past the first days.
> 
> (Also ft:   
> >Me, telling my mom about this fic: and then Frank is like HOW DO I MAKE SOUP  
> >My mom, bless her: didnt he cook for him and micro  
> >Me:   
> >Me:  
> >Me: fuck!)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it me or are these chapters getting longer not shorter?
> 
> This is probably my favourite chapter so far, because I am a sucker for non-sexual intimacy.

Frank helped her through to the bathroom, her feet working better now but still not quite connected to her body the way she was used to. She no longer felt completely disassociated, which was a good thing in some respects, but there was the downside that now every inch of her hurt, even when it wasn't working correctly. 

Her feet felt sluggish against the carpet, and her arm felt limp around his shoulders as he supported her. They made it into the bathroom in one piece and he lent her against the sink. "Want me to leave you here--" he started, but the idea of letting him _go_ and having to get into the bath alone made her grab at him.

"Hey, hey," he murmured and stepped closer again. "It's okay."

"Sorry," she whispered. It felt like all of her energy, everything she'd poured into the walk from the bed to the bathroom, was depleted. "Just, uh... hold on." Her fingers found the first button of her blouse, trying to get it undone. Her fingers rejected her attempts, fought her at every turn. "God, fucking..." She choked back a sob, a mixture of embarrassment, shame and downright frustration. "God!"

"Hey, shh, shh." He took her hands in his and she looked up, half slumped against the sink, to meet his eyes. "It's okay. Let me help, yeah?"

If anyone had told her back in that diner, that one day she'd be in Frank Castle's bathroom as he helped her get undressed... Well, she wouldn't have ever believed it.

"Okay," she whispered, voice cracking and breaking. "Okay..."

"I won't look," he promised and she dropped her gaze, averting her eyes and taking a breath as he started to gently undo the buttons of her blouse.

"It's fine, not much to look at," she said.

She felt his fingers falter, hesitate slightly on the third button, the one between her breasts, and she kept her eyes away from his, then he undid that button too, and the ones following it, until her blouse was open and he could gently pull her from the sink and tug the shirt off her arms. 

"There we go," he said, voice low and gentle. "Okay?"

"Okay." She finally lifted her gaze and he was looking at her face with the softest brown eyes she'd ever seen in her life. Somehow it was worse than if he'd been checking her out, or his eyes had been lingering on her bra. Instead he was just... Frank. She let her head fall forward, forehead finding a place against his clavicle, and closed her eyes. "I'm so sorry."

"I know," he said and looped an arm around her shoulders loosely. At some point between barging in on him in the shower and now, he'd put a sweater on over his vest. She had no idea when that was, nor did she have a clue how long it'd been. She knew that should scare her, she knew she should be freaked out that the concept of time had left her behind, but he was warm, chest and arm both, and safe, and no matter how much time had passed, she was okay. She would be okay. 

"Ready to get in the bath?" he said and she nodded, taking a moment to breathe in the familiar scent of him and his clothes, then drawing her head back, lifting it back up even though it felt like the heaviest thing in the world. "C'mon."

He helped her across, held onto her as she took the biggest step in the world over the edge of the bath and put her foot in the hot water. "Oh, god," she muttered.

"Too hot?" he said, immediately on guard, ready to fix it somehow. 

She shook her head. "No, no... No, it's amazing." She sunk down into the water with his help, slipped down until it was up over her chest, soaking into her bra. He still hadn't looked and she admired his discipline. She'd be staring at him if their positions were reversed. "Thank you."

"See?" He got down onto the floor by the bath, settling on his knees, a gentle smile on his face. "I know things."

She laughed under her breath, relaxing into the water and closing her eyes. "Yeah, you do..." Her body didn't hurt for the first time in days, but the exhaustion was still there, deep in her bones, greeting her like an old friend. "Forgot how this felt."

"What? A bath?" he said.

"Withdrawal." She turned her head so she could lean it against the side of the bath and open her eyes a crack to watch him. "Haven't gone this long without since I went back to it."

"How bad?" he said.

"Mm... Not bad yet." She didn't really want him to know how bad it would get, wanted to protect him from seeing her like that, but she knew Frank and she knew how perceptive he was, knew that even if she tried to hide it he'd see right through it, and her. "Just... tired. Exhausted. Everything's... slow? Every time you wake me I just want to beg you to let me go back to sleep."

He nodded thoughtfully. "A'right, let's get your hair washed so you can strip off, get clean and I can change the bed while you soak." He got to his feet, reached above her head and grabbed a couple of bottles. He set one down on the little shelf of the bath itself - shower gel, according to the blurry label - and the other he showed her. "This all right?"

It was just some 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, the kind she was pretty sure Kevin, Todd, her father and even Foggy probably used, and too basic to be anything Matt Murdock would put on his hair. It was just... soap, with a little extra on the side. It made her smile sleepily. "Yeah, s'perfect... very you." 

"Eh?" he said. 

She shook her head. He'd meant was it okay for _her_ hair, not if it was okay in an existential sense. 

"Gotta sit up a bit," he said and she bobbed her head tiredly and pushed up against the bath, lifting until she was more seated than lying, head still a little lolled, the ends of her hair soaked from the water. "Any, uh--" She heard the cap of the bottle pop. "--special requests?"

"What?" she said, slightly slurred from the exhaustion she was fighting. 

"Maria always said you don't condition your roots," he grumbled. She felt him pick the shower head up, and his fingers ruffled lightly through her hair, lifting it from the scalp. "Tilt back." She complied, closing her eyes. "And she always had this fancy-ass... sulfur free..."

"Sulfate," she muttered. 

"Yeah, that!" He soaked her hair from the shower head, cooler than the bath water but still delightfully warm. "Wondered if you had shit like that."

"Umm..." She made a soft little sound under her breath as his fingers ran through her hair, making sure to wet every bit with the water. She knew he was used to being grimy or dirty or covered in blood, but it still made her smile a little that he hadn't complained even a little over how dirty her hair was. He was just... taking care of her. "I just have a... shampoo for blonde hair."

His fingers paused. "You a bottle blonde?" he said in what sounded like utter confusion. 

She _laughed_ , hard enough she startled herself. "God, no," she said. "No, but it... s'extra fragile. Blonde's finer, thinner... My hair used to be real flat in high school, had to swap products so it didn't..." She mimed with her hands, struggling to find the words as her brain did a dance and refused to focus. "Uh..."

"Weigh it down?" he tried. She waved her hand in agreement.

"Yeah! Yeah." 

His fingers paused in her hair again. "I can go out and get--"

"No, it's okay. You're doing enough."

He didn't seem to agree with her, his fingers not moving for a long moment, then she felt him draw away, heard the squirt of shampoo into his hands, and he said, "Keep your eyes closed, now."

"'kay," she said softly and complied, leaning back into his touch as he started massaging the shampoo through her hair. 

A moment of utter bliss passed over her, strong enough to completely eliminate the fog that was covering her from the beginnings of withdrawal. Frank's fingers rubbed at her scalp, worked through her hair and washed every strand with such utter care and attention she felt as though she'd melt into the bath itself. A little part of her whispered to ask him to do that for all of her, too exhausted to imagine properly washing her body, but what was left of her pride shut that down immediately. 

She was only aware she was making contented little sighing noises when his hands disappeared from her hair again and they stopped, replaced by a dissatisfied little, "Mngh." 

He chuckled, a soft sound that made her smile from head to toe, and patted the spot of her scalp closest to her forehead. "You're like a puppy dog," he decided. "Sad when I stop petting you."

She wasn't sure if she should be offended or pleased. She knew it'd be a compliment if _she_ said someone was like a puppy, she loved dogs, but she wasn't sure where Frank stood on the issue. "Mmgh." 

Another chuckle. She huffed under her breath. "Felt nice," she muttered. "Really nice."

"I'm glad. Gonna rinse, okay?" The shower head moved again and she murmured an agreement. His fingers returned to her hair at the same time the warm water did, and she tilted her head back further so he could rinse her hair properly. If she was still high, she'd probably be waxing poetic at him, telling him all about how much she loved his touch, how gentle he was, how caring. It was probably a good job she could barely speak. 

"Sit up a bit, yeah?" he said and she groaned and complained under her breath the whole time but she sat upright, leaning forwards to curl over her own knees as he washed all the suds and dirt out of her hair. 

A thought struck her as she tried to accept the fact any second he'd stop touching her, stop running those lovely fingers through her hair.

He'd asked, right? He'd asked if she did anything special? 

"Umm, I usually wash my hair twice," she murmured. 

He paused. "Yeah?"

She nodded. "Extra clean, 'specially when it's been real dirty."

If he thought she was bullshitting him for the sake of getting more time spent rubbing her head, he didn't say anything. Either way she wasn't lying, she almost always did wash her hair twice. 

The soap returned, as did his warm, tender fingers, and she made soft, happy noises under her breath, eyes closed, face pressed into her knees. For the next few minutes she just basked, enjoying every solitary second of the experience that was having her hair washed by Frank Castle. He murmured, "Lean back," and she tilted back, eyes closed, so he could rinse away from her eyes, then forwards again to wash off the back of her hair.

"All done," he said after a moment and it took all of her willpower not to complain voraciously that the hair washing had finished. "I don't have a hair dryer or anything..."

"S'okay," she said and twisted around to look at him over her shoulder. "Thank you."

He smiled a bit, wiping his hand on a towel. "Wanna put this around your hair?"

"Yeah." He handed over the towel and she spent a moment fighting her muscles, trying to tie the offending fabric up to hold her hair out of the way. It didn't work, so he ended up taking that out of her grasp, carefully pulling her head back and her hair up so he could wrap the towel around her head and tuck the corner in against her temple. 

She wasn't sure she'd ever been touched so tenderly before in her life.

"Right," he said. "I'll leave you to get done and clean, yeah. Just, uh, toss that into the corner and..." He put a larger towel down on the corner of the bath, closest to the door. "For when you're done. Just, uh, let the water run out and sit up a bit and lean and yeah."

"Frank?" Her voice broke and he looked at her. "Can you help?" She wrapped around her knees again, not sure if she was preserving some notion of modesty or protecting his eyes. "Clasp. Arm won't..."

He softened again. "Yeah." He came closer and leaned in, his fingers unhooking her bra. She felt it loosen and fall against her knees and she let out a little sigh of relief at the release of tension. "Better?" 

"Yeah." She smiled over her shoulder at him and he came around the bath, stepping past the towel and over to the door. 

"I'mma leave this pulled to, a'right? I won't... come back in without knocking, though." He shot her a half smile. His eyes hadn't moved from her face once. 

"Thanks." She wanted to be more appreciative, put more passion and thought into her words, but all she could manage was _thanks_ so that was all she gave him. He seemed content enough with that, though, and he stepped out, leaving the door pulled to so he could keep an ear out for her.

She wriggled out of her underwear in the water and tossed it over the side of the bath, following it with her bra. Both items were soaked, but despite the water they shouldn't have felt as though they weighed as much as they did. She sighed to herself, leaning her head against the side of the bath again, and watched her feet in the water, eyelids closing. 

The closet door opened and shut next to the bathroom and she startled awake, water splashing with her sudden movement.

"Okay in there?"

"Mm!" She rubbed a wet hand over her face. "Yeah!"

The door opened a little more and he was just in the doorway, his back to her. "You need help?"

Desperately, that was why she was here. "I'm okay, Frank," she said, voice low. "Gonna get clean now."

"Let me know." He stepped back out. 

She took the shower gel from the side of the bath and popped the cap, sniffing it curiously. She recognised it instantly, the soft smell of _Frank_ , the smell that lingered beneath the scent of metal, of blood, of all the fights he'd been in. There was something else on him too, probably his detergent, and she smiled a little as she realised by the end of the week she was going to smell of all those things too. 

She washed as quickly as her slacking muscles would allow, spending extra time under her arms, between her legs, and at the back of her neck, the points where she'd sweated the most and felt the least clean, but let the rest of her body wash off in the soapy water, too drained to spend time scrubbing her shoulders or legs. She rubbed her feet against each other in the water and let out a little sigh, leaning her head back against the bath.

"Okay," she said under her breath, mostly to herself, and sat forwards, levering herself up to stand and-- 

Her legs didn't cooperate, fighting against her attempts to get into a standing position. She crashed back down, water splashing over the sides of the bath and a little noise of pain escaping her lips.

"Karen?!" Frank skidded to a halt in the doorway, turned away, chest visibly rising and falling quickly with the sudden panic he was feeling. "If you don't tell me not to, I'm coming in."

"I'm okay." It wasn't her telling him not to, though. "I... Can you help me get out?" It felt like some kind of surrender, like giving up what little autonomy she felt she had left. She'd lost a lot of it to Matt Murdock and his damn guilt complexes, to him showing up time and again to save her, often from herself, but at least she'd always been clean, and washed, and able to stand on her own two feet. 

"Yeah. I'm coming in, okay?" he said and she mumbled an agreement, eyes down and knees pulled up to her chest, ankles and shins pushed together to obscure a view she knew he wouldn't even try to get a look at. 

He settled on his knees by the bath and reached out, touching the side of her head and the towel she was wearing. "Hey, it's okay," he said, meeting her gaze. She wondered if the agony of her situation and her embarrassment was reflected in her eyes or if he was just seeing it anyway. Maybe he just knew how he'd feel. They'd always been alike, after all. "Don't worry about it."

"How?" She kept her chin on her knees and didn't break eye contact. "I never wanted you to have to see me like this? Help me bathe? Wash my hair for me?" She'd kick her feet if she had the energy. "I..." She shook her head and buried her face in her knees. She wasn't going to break down into sobs and let that wave of humiliation take her too. It wasn't going to happen.

"How 'bout we strike a deal, you and I?" She felt him lean against the tub, and the backs of his fingers rested against the side of her knee. She lifted her face, opened her eyes, and he wasn't looking anywhere he shouldn't, but his gaze was soft and he had one arm slung across the bath so that his hand rested against her leg. Contact. A promise he was there, even when she couldn't see him. 

"Deal?" She sniffled and rubbed at her nose.

"I'll tell David that next time I get shot all to hell and need help gettin' back and forth 'n all that," he said, "he calls you."

"I'd rather you didn't get shot to hell again," she said flatly. 

"We can't always get what we wish for, ma'am," he said in amusement. 

She rolled her eyes and rested the side of her head against her knees. On the one hand, she didn't want _his_ humiliation to be a trade-off for hers. On the other hand, she wanted to be called. She _wanted_ David to call _her_ and ask her to come help take care of Frank when he needed it. She wanted that to be part of their weird friendship, the odd companionship of two people who didn't really fit anywhere else. 

"How's that a deal?" she said. "What's my part?"

" _Your_ part," he said, "is you stop actin' like I'm some stranger to you, I'm not." 

"I know that," she said. "I'd be just embarrassed if Foggy was in your position--"

"I'm not him, either," he said, cutting her off. Her eyebrows rose slightly, but he never broke his gaze from hers, something steely in his eyes like she'd never seen before, even when he was about to take lives. "You and I, we've... We've been in the trenches together, yeah? I've put a gun to your throat at _your_ demand, to get us outta a bad spot. You know who else I'd let convince me to use 'em as a human fuckin' shield for _my_ sake?"

"David? Curtis?" she said.

"No."

She didn't know if her eyes widened physically or if it just felt like they did.

He shook his head. "No. Neither of 'em. I'd trust 'em both with my life and I have, too, dozen times over. But I wouldn't do _that_. That's not somethin' you do with-- It just isn't. It's different."

"How is it different?" she said, searching his eyes for some kind of clarity.

"Dunno." She laughed and he smiled, crooked but soft and real. "But it is. It really is. So how 'bout we don't act like we're anything to each other than what we are, yeah? If I can hold a gun to your head and you not _question_ it, not _hesitate_. If I can tell you which wire to pull and you not even _flinch_ , you just do it?" She swallowed hard, shivering slightly at the thought of that day, of Lewis with his arm around her, Frank beaten half to hell and still bleeding from what she now knew was probably a bullet fired by a man he trusted. "We can do this."

We.

She felt the tension run out of her body like the water that'd gone down the drain not minutes before and she nodded, lowering her arms from her knees and taking a slow, careful breath. "Okay, okay, Frank. Okay."

He brushed the backs of his fingers to her knee again, then stood up, picking the towel up from the end of the bath and tossing it over his shoulder. He reached out for her, hands extended to pull her up. "I won't look."

She looked up at his hands and shook her head. "It's okay. I don't mind if you do." She took his hands, pulled herself up by them, and he kept his gaze less rigidly focused on her face this time, not _looking_ but not fighting so hard not to see by accident. When her legs nearly gave out, he stepped closer, one strong arm circling her waist. "Can't, I can't..."

His grip tightened and before she knew what was happening he'd lifted her out of the bath with one arm and set her down on the floor in front of him. She let out a surprised little giggle and smiled at him and he smiled back, eyes on her face again as he pulled the towel around her shoulders and wrapped her up in it. "Reckon you can walk back to bed?"

Pride said she'd try. Trust said, "Maybe halfway?"

"Half's a good start." He put his arm around her again, this time on the outside of the towel, and he helped her take slow, careful steps out of the bathroom and along the carpeted floor of his apartment. 

She made it as far as the kitchen before her legs started to give, and he swept her up into his arms. The towel fell open, but he didn't look, he just kept his focus on carrying her over to the bed and setting her down on the edge. His gentle hands tucked the towel back around her. 

"Right," he said. "I put your shit to wash later, so..." He stepped away and over to his drawers and she pulled the towel up to her nose, burying her mouth and chin in it and watching him from behind its fuzzy warmth. He pulled out a pair of sweatpants from one drawer and a button-down black shirt from another and brought them over. "These should fit okay," he said of the pants. "Shirt'll swamp you but the length'll be fine." He put both down on the bed next to her and she smiled in a daze. 

"Thanks," she said. 

"Can you dress?" he checked. 

"Uh..." She shook her head. "Yeah, but... help?" 

He nodded and over the next couple of minutes he helped her put the clothes on. He wrapped the shirt around her shoulders, outside the towel, then did up the first few buttons for her, tapping under her chin once when the opportunity presented itself and making her laugh out loud at how absurd the whole thing was.

Once the shirt was on, he got down on his knees in front of her and helped her put her feet into the pants, then pulled them up as far as her knees. "Got the rest?" 

"Yeah." He averted his eyes as she squirmed slightly on the bed, lifting her hips with what was left of her energy and pulling the pants on up to her waist under the towel. She pulled the string until they were tight enough to not fall right off, and smiled to herself. The leg length was perfect for her, and his shirt came down to her mid-thigh, comfortable and warm. 

"Here." She offered out the towel and he looked back to take it, shooting her a smile. 

She reached up, pulling the other towel from her hair and rubbing it down. She'd usually blow-dry it, or spend a little while with straighteners, but she neither had the tools nor the stamina, so she settled for this. 

"Better now you're clean?"

She sighed softy and smiled back, lowering the towel to her lap and watching him. "Yeah," she said. "Thanks for... lookin' after me."

He moved closer, until his knees brushed hers, and leaned down, pressing a kiss to the top of her damp head. "Always," he said. He took the hair towel off her and disappeared back into the bathroom. She could see him putting the towels over a rack to dry and she smiled to herself at how domestic it was. How warm.

She crawled up onto the bed, curling up, and she whined under her breath when the smell of _Frank_ on the pillow she'd colonised for cuddles was all gone, the bed washed and clean and no longer smelling like he'd slept in it. She huffed, unable to figure out how to politely ask him to rub himself all over the bedclothes so she could sleep easier, and dozed off to working through different phrasings of, "Frank, come sleep with me," in her head.

She stirred a few minutes later to the bed moving and she turned her head, blearily blinking at Frank as he shifted the covers under her skinny frame and then pulled them over her body, tucking them in around her torso and moving her hair up onto the pillow where it wouldn't chill her while she slept. 

"When's Lieberman here?" she managed to ask, even though the name probably came out more like _Leaverman_. 

"Couple hours." He tucked her in a little more and she decided his wife and kids died happy if they had this every night he was home. "I'll wake you before I let him in, introduce you proper."

She settled right down, nodding to herself. "S'good. Thanks..."

He started to move away and she grabbed him, only aware she'd done it when her grip had closed around his wrist. He didn't speak and she didn't either, pulling his arm down to curl around, tucking her face against it and closing her eyes to go back to sleep. He sat on the bed by her, and although he moved before Lieberman got there, she didn't know when. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOPEFULLY this'll be the only chapter today (6th December), because I'd quite like to try and get some work done lol. These two won't leave my brain alone. But we'll see, maybe I'll end up doing both. 
> 
> Hope you like it!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tags are making me mad because I had one that explained I love Matt but he made me mad in season 3 because the plot made him a twerp in a lot of ways, and AO3 ate it without telling me I'd used too many characters, so now there's just my statement of liking Matt and S3 being dumb without the connecting parts and I don't have the spoons to fix it!! 
> 
> Anyway I wrote a bunch of my actual original work today AND I wrote some of this too!! I woke up with All The Ideas for something (original) new and I wrote out 800 words of that, too, and then... I have no idea where I'll ever take it, but it was nice to just tap it out because it was there. 
> 
> I'm gonna try and put up a chapter every day or two, that's my goal. :) I went for a nap and wrote ~900 words of this on my phone from bed because...? I don't know? Naps are for suckers? (I really needed a nap)

David arrived right at three, like he knew Frank would be pissed if he got there late. He knocked on the door and Frank called through, "Hold on," and woke Karen. "Hey, hey."

She stirred under his touch to her shoulder, rubbing at her face, but she seemed to wake a little easier this time. 

"David's here," he said. "You good?"

She nodded and sat up slowly, shuffling up until she was properly upright, head held high, and tucked her hair behind her ears. "Would you tell me if I looked awful?" she said, stifling a yawn.

"Probably not," he said as he headed for the door. "Don't think I'd notice." 

Whatever she thought of that statement was left behind as he opened the door and David came slouching in. He had a duffel bag thrown over one shoulder, and his other hand was clutching a plastic bag. When Frank gave him a look, he said, "Clothes in here, sundries in here." He waved the plastic bag around. "One of her bottles was leaky, didn't want it getting into her clothes."

This attention to details like that, Frank thought, was why David was the one who had stupid silk robes, and Frank was the one who stuck to things he could easily get blood out of. 

Well, one of the reasons.

"Hey," Karen said from the bed and David looked around, waving a hand at her a little.

"Hey." He handed the bags over to Frank and took a few steps across, extending his hand. "I'm David."

"Karen." She smiled and shook his hand. "Nice to finally meet you in person."

"Yeah, same." 

"I forgot you two talked about me behind my back," Frank mused, bringing the bags across. "Clothes and stuff," he said to Karen, who made a little whining sound under her breath and took both bags, putting them on the bed. "Whatcha want me to do with them?"

"Uh..." Her eyes glazed slightly and he waved her off.

"Y'know what," he said, "I'll put this in the bathroom and this one can stay over here, yeah?" He dropped the duffel onto the chair by the window and she smiled and nodded from the bed as he set it down. 

He put the plastic bag down in the bathroom, one ear listening to Karen and David.

"How, uhh... How're you feeling?" David said. "Frank said you've not been feeling well."

"Withdrawal," she said. "It's okay, I know he told you."

"Oh." A pause. "Question stands though. How're you feeling?"

"Like shit," she said but he could hear a bit of a smile in her voice. "Thanks for asking. How's... You got to go back to your family, yeah? How's it..."

Frank ambled back out, quiet and just observing as he picked up his wallet and jacket.

"Oh, you know," David said. He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and he looked out of place, like he wasn't quite sure how to relate to Karen. "My kids don't quite know what to do with me some of the time, they got used to not having a dad so now they have to get used to having one again. Sarah's still trying to get her head around the fact I was gone for a year but not really dead. It's a process. We're... processing."

"Sounds like you're doing well to me," Karen said with a smile and David mumbled some kind of thanks under his breath.

"Right, are you two going to be okay while I'm out?" Frank said, tossing his wallet between his hands and looking between them. 

David looked to Karen, who smiled and nodded. "Yeah. It'll give me chance to get to know David. Been wanting to."

"Same!" David shot her a smile, his shoulders losing a lot of their tension and his eyes lighting up. "I've been wanting to figure out your thing ever since Frank had me point a camera at your window." A pause and he looked over at Frank sheepishly. 

Frank just looked at him dead on without letting a single emotion come onto his face. "Damnit, David," he said. "She wasn't supposed to _know_ about that!"

"Oh, god, Frank, I'm sorry!" David scratched at his head and looked over at Karen. "It was just one, to keep an eye out for the flowers, and I--" He broke off at the look of downright amusement on Karen's face. "Why're you laughing? Why's she laughing?"

"'cause she already knew about the camera." Frank pulled his jacket on and waved a hand at him, grabbing his laundry basket and heading for the door. "See ya later."

"I hate that man," David's voice said as Frank closed the door, and he could hear Karen laughing softly in response. 

***

Frank hung out in the corridor as Curtis' meeting came to a close, leaning against the wall and keeping one eye on each door at all times. A few people came and went, veterans looking for somewhere to feel like they belonged, and once the meeting ended the group filed out, only a couple hanging back to talk to Curtis.

He wandered in, getting a cup of coffee from the table and listening as Curtis gave good advice to a kid who didn't know what to do with himself now he didn't have a war to fight.

Frank could relate to that.

Once the kid had left, Curtis looked around, smiling at Frank. "Still just drinking my coffees and not coming to my meetings, Frank?"

Frank snorted under his breath and took a swig of black coffee. "Ehh, I come to some of them," he said. "But your coffee's better than your spiel, Curt."

"Ha," Curtis said in response. He started stacking chairs and Frank put his empty cup down, trailing across to help. "Everything okay with you? David said you're helping an addict?"

"Yeah." Frank dropped a chair into place, turning for another. "I need some information."

"Course." Curtis stopped what he was doing, heading over to the table and pulling a folder out from underneath. "Did some printouts for you, just basic stuff." He offered it out and Frank took it. 

"Thanks, man," he said. "I was hoping you'd give me personal wisdom though." 

"What do you want to know?" Curtis sat down on one of the two last remaining chairs and Frank took the other. 

"Just... What do I need to look out for? How do I help her?" he said. "What do I _do_ , Curt? I... I'm at a loss, here. I've never had to deal with anything like this before."

"What's she been on?" Curtis asked. "David said something about cocaine?"

"Yeah." Frank scratched at the back of his neck and leaned back in his seat. "She did it a bunch when she was younger, like nineteen? So that'd be... ten years ago, I reckon. She kicked the habit by herself, but it came back recently. Realised she was fucking up her shit when she ended up taking heroin to replace the cocaine she couldn't get."

"Jesus," Curtis muttered. "All right, uh. Did you already get rid of any drugs, medicine, shit like that?" 

"Yeah." Frank shrugged. "I only had some booze, aspirin, so I just poured them all away."

"Okay." Curtis was working through an internal list, Frank could see it all over his face, so he gave him time and patience. "With addiction, you have to be careful. A lot of addicts replace one addiction with another. Smoking, for instance. A lot of drug addicts swap from hard drugs to cigarettes. Others go from drugs to alcohol. Unless you're okay with her picking up other bad habits, you'll have to be careful what you let her get up to."

"Great," Frank grumbled under his breath.

"Some addicts take up self-destructive tendencies, or thrill-seek," Curtis continued. Frank froze, thinking back to all the ways Karen liked to throw herself into danger. He didn't say anything. "Other options include sex."

Frank looked up. "What?"

"Addicts can replace a substance problem with a sex addiction," Curtis said. "Endorphins. So--"

"Yeah, well, there'll be none of that, will there?" Frank grumbled out. "Nothing to worry about there. I'm not gonna go out and buy her cigarettes or fuck her or anything like that."

"Unless you're going to keep her on house arrest throughout her recovery," Curtis said, "it's not just about what you'll provide her with."

Frank faltered. He was used to not really going out much since he'd been released into Pete Castiglione, it didn't really bother him, but he hadn't thought about Karen, about whether she'd go stir crazy after a while.

"Shit, Curt," he muttered. "Am I biting off more than I can chew here? I'm a soldier, not a..." There wasn't a word to finish that sentence with that didn't feel unfair to Karen, so he just went quiet.

"Who is it?" Curtis asked and Frank pulled a few faces, trying to wave him off. "C'mon, man, you trusted me with your secret life, you can trust me with this."

"Trying not to embarrass her too much," Frank huffed. "It's bad enough what she's already been through without me throwing extra fuel on her fire, y'know?"

"Yeah, I get that," Curtis said, watching him with ridiculously soft eyes. Frank would never understand how he could go through all the shit he'd been through and come out the other side so _soft_ and gentle and caring. He just came out of it with a grudge and an itchy trigger finger. "But if you want my opinion on if you can handle it, I think it depends on who it is you're dealing with."

"Karen," Frank said after a moment. "It's Karen."

"You'll do fine."

Frank looked up in surprise. "What makes you so sure?"

Curtis shrugged. "There's only a few people I know you'd chew your right arm off to not let down," he said. "Me, I was one. Billy, before. David, recently. And her. She's the reason you found Schoonover, and you don't talk about it much but she's why you started opening up again, too, after everything. You feel indebted to her. You'd chase her into hell given half the chance."

"Already did that once," he muttered, almost tasting the charred flavour of Lewis on his lips. "I'd do it again, too."

"Just don't let her guilt trip you," Curtis said. "She'll spend a few days withdrawing and it'll be rough, but then the cravings'll set in. She'll get irritable, agitated, she'll do anything for her next fix. The more she's been on, or doing, the worst it'll be. I won't lie to you, Frank, it's gonna get real rough before it gets better."

Frank bobbed his head a few times, not looking directly at Curtis as he processed. "What milestones am I lookin' at here?" he said finally. "Those, uh, NA, AA, whatever groups, they do like thirty day chips and shit, yeah? Am I lookin' at stuff like that?"

"Ehh, yeah, but it doesn't have to be anything that complicated," Curtis said. "Setting goals for her should help, stuff like... hooking her Netflix subscription up when she makes it two weeks, taking her out for lunch when she makes it three. Things to keep her having something to look forward to, and marks on a calendar to see how long she's gone. Human nature is to not want to break a streak, especially for someone like Karen, from all I've heard and read about her."

Frank nodded some more. "Milestones and goals. Got it."

"From everything I've read and the people I spoke to last night," Curtis said, "the first thirty are the most important. If she can get through those, the cravings should subside and she'll be able to go without the desperation. You just have to keep an eye on her, keep her moving, motivated and monitored."

"Thirty days," Frank muttered, "got it."

When he looked up, Curtis was giving him a look. "What?"

"Uh, no, Frank. It isn't the first thirty days," Curtis said slowly, "it's the first thirty weeks."

That settled over Frank slowly like a heavy blanket. His mind struggled to grasp it as a concept. Thirty weeks. That was... seven times thirty...

"How, uh, many days is that?" Frank said when his mind wouldn't cooperate through the haze of slight panic.

"Two-ten," Curtis said. "Seven months. Give or take."

Huh. He'd have to keep her with him for seven months. That was a long time. He'd been deployed for longer than that, he'd spent more time away from Maria right when she was pregnant with Frank Junior than that. He could do it, but he couldn't imagine a world where she wouldn't get utterly sick of him after one month, let alone seven. He'd have to reshuffle most of his life, find space for her things, figure out sleeping arrangements and how to best keep an eye on her, and when it was too much for her he'd have to find someone else for her to stay with. David wasn't a good option - he had kids to think about, after all - but maybe he could work up to her letting Foggy in, or Curtis, or-- 

"You could just take her to rehab," Curtis said, suddenly so very gentle. "Thirty weeks is a big commitment, to anyone or anything. You don't even have a dog. It's okay to need a professional to handle it."

Frank took a moment to genuinely consider that, to really muse the concept of dropping Karen off at a facility and maybe visiting her every few weeks.

His takeaway from Curtis' suggestion however ended up, "Would a dog help her recovery? Been meaning to get one."

Curtis chuckled under his breath. "Yeah. It probably would."

***

"How'd you two meet, anyway?"

Karen looked up. They'd not spoken much since Frank left. David had made his way into the kitchen, started washing out the bowls and cutlery from the night before, and they'd sat quietly the whole time, just occasionally offering up a few words here and there. He'd made two cups of tea, one of which he'd given to her, and then he'd leaned against the counters that separated the bed from the kitchen and sipped his own. For two people who wanted to get to know each other, neither of them seemed to know where to begin, right up until David asked _that_ question. 

"I was protecting a witness," she said, "Frank and his gun had other ideas."

David looked across at her and she wasn't sure she'd ever seen someone look as utterly amused as David Lieberman in that moment. "So he shot at you?"

"Past me, really," she said. "He never would've risked hitting me, he was just trying - and succeeding--" David nodded his head as though to say _of course_. "--to kill Grotto."

"Yet you ended up here," David said.

Karen shrugged, taking a mouthful of tea and considering her words. "I did my research," she said. "Figured out he wasn't just a psycho killer, that he had reasons for what he was doing. By the time we met face-to-face, he... I guess he had my understanding. Got inside my head."

"Yeah, he does that," David said. He swilled the tea around his cup and Karen watched him over hers. She could feel the brainfog coming back, threatening to overwhelm her ability to communicate again, but she wasn't quite there. The post-bath nap had left her recharged far more than the dirty-body, dirty-hair, dirty-bed sleeps had for the last few days.

"What about you?" she said. "I know you got in contact with him, I was the one that tracked down your name, but I don't know what happened after that, the pieces that brought you and him... here." By 'here' she meant into a world where Frank not only trusted him with her, but with everything else in his life. It was a far cry from the man who probably wanted him dead for even knowing he was alive. 

"Ah," David said, "so I have you to thank for him knocking me out, stripping me naked and tying me to my chair."

Karen coughed out a mouthful of tea.

David was at her side in a moment, patting her back. "Oh, crap, I'm sorry!"

"He _what?!_ " she said, somewhere between horror, outrage, shock and hilarity. "Really?!"

"He! I!" David patted her back until she stopped coughing on her tea. "Yeah."

"Jesus, Frank," she said.

"I always say that too!" David replied. She started laughing again and he laughed with her this time, since she wasn't choking to death on the tea he'd given her. "He knows how to make an introduction, I guess."

She considered that for a moment. "How'd he piss Madani off so bad? He tie her up too?"

David paused. "I may have hit her car and flipped it and he dragged her out of the wreck."

Karen opened and closed her mouth, then squinted across at him. "Really?"

"It was a bad idea poorly executed, I'll admit," he said. He flopped down on the chair by the window, too polite to sit on the bed with her, and she tracked him with her eyes as he moved. "So what happened to you?"

Karen looked at him in confusion. "What?"

He gestured at her. "People don't just go get hooked on drugs for nothing. He said your boyfriend died, but..."

"He wasn't my boyfriend," she said with a sigh. "It was complicated and he... was _not_ mine."

A weird look passed over David's face, but whatever he was thinking didn't make it out as words. "Fair enough," he said. "Didn't answer the question."

"I know," she said.

He rolled his eyes. "You two are like peas in a pod," he said, leaning back in his chair.

She shot him a grin, fighting hard not to end up lying down again, the exhaustion working its way back into her bones bit by bit. "Well, I'll take that as a compliment."

He huffed. "You should."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have time (or spoons, I'm feeling... weirdly unwell, actually) to reply to all the comments right now, but I'll reply to all of you lovely, amazing people when I wake up tomorrow, most likely. Thank you so much for all your lovely feedback. ♥♥
> 
> Not sure I really nailed Curtis quite right this chapter, but I tried! Let me know what you think?


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoop, whoop. I took today off a little, but I wanted to get something out for you guys because I'm thirsty for feedback and I'm enjoying writing this so much! 
> 
> I tried to delve deeper into Frank's brain injury this time, which I'm hoping is well-fitting to the canon and the way Jon plays him. Let me know what you think!

Frank would never admit it to many people, the list shorter than the mental list of _people he didn't manage to kill_ , but he'd always liked laundromats. It gave him a chance to zone out a little, focus on something else. It was an excuse to just _not_ for a while. 

For a change though, Frank wanted to go home.

He did his laundry, dried it too, gathered it up into the basket and shoved it in the back of his car, then drove to the nearest convenience store, where he bought a dog calendar, muttering the whole time about it being overpriced garbage. 

He took his time driving home, no matter how much he wanted to speed his way back to check on Karen, and he stopped a couple of streets over, idling the engine and flicking through the printouts Curtis had given him.

It was all basic stuff, really, the dos and don'ts of handling an addict in general, with some added specific information on how to help a cocaine addict through their withdrawal. Lots of the pages talked about _thirty weeks_ and he glanced over at the calendar, then back at the printout. Two pages were dedicated to being the partner of someone who was addicted, withdrawing or trying to get clean, and Frank squinted at the scribbled red text in Curtis' handwriting that read, "COHABITATION!" as though Frank was going to freak out over being called Karen's partner. 

Partner meant a lot of things. David had been his partner too. He didn't have a problem with _partner_. 

He flipped to the next page, dragging his eyes along the bullet points, skimming them. A lot of the information reiterated that addicts were liars, cheats, thieves, that they'd do anything to get their next fix including selling the precious possessions of their carer's.

"Joke would be on you," he grumbled under his breath, "I ain't got nothing."

He couldn't imagine a world where Karen would steal anything precious of his to sell anyway, if he did have something. She seemed too conscientious. 

As though the printout read his mind, the next page talked about addiction as a thing that changed the addict's personality, something they struggled to grapple control over, and that often their behaviours would become out of character and erratic, and not themselves at all, and to not plan treatment or make assumptions based around who they were before.

He made grumbling noises under his breath and tossed the printout onto the passenger seat, drumming his thumb against the wheel. 

He could relate to that, not being who he was before. Sure, he'd done some shit in Afghanistan, but the old Frank would never, ever have become the Punisher. Anyone who planned things or conducted themselves around who he was _before_ all that would be in for one hell of a shock. 

He opened the glovebox, rummaging around past a pistol to find a pen, then pulled the printout across and turned it over, scribbling down a list of plans, thoughts and action. A strategy.

He was _good_ at strategy, damnit.

Once he was done, he drove home, piled the printout and the calendar onto the laundry basket and let himself in.

David was on the sofa, his legs slung over the arm, his head on one of the couch cushions, an iPad in his hands. Karen was curled up, asleep again, and when Frank looked across, David caught his eye and put a finger to his lips. He got off the sofa, slinking over. "We hung out a while but she seemed tired, so I said she should sleep more. Seemed embarrassed about it, but..." He shrugged, turning his iPad off and putting it on the counter. 

"Thanks," Frank said. "Did she drink her tea?"

"Yeah." David gestured at the things on the basket. "What's this?"

"Laundry," Frank said and quirked an eyebrow at him as David looked back at him with an _are you serious?_ expression on his face. He rolled his eyes. "Printouts from Curt, information and shit." He offered them out and David took them, flipping through the pages. "Useful enough to be goin' on with." He grabbed the calendar, slapping it against the fridge and pinning it there with the pitbull fridge magnet David had given him as a housewarming present. At the time, he'd just eyed it and gruffly admitted, "I like pitbulls," but now he was grateful he had something to stick the calendar up with. He didn't want to put Karen through listening to him hammer a nail into the wall when she was trying to sleep. 

"What's with the calendar?" David said.

Frank shrugged. "First thirty weeks," he said. "Gonna mark it off, make some milestones for her, shit like that."

"Yeah?" David was looking through the papers. "You sure about this, Frank? It's a pretty big commitment for a guy like you."

Frank looked around at him. "What do you mean a guy like me?"

"I mean what're you gonna do with her when you're off, y'know, punishing!" David said, gesturing at the wall, which Frank was sure he was imagining as a group of big bad drug lords Frank was going to put a bullet in, but was just a wall in reality. That felt a little on the nose. 

"Got no one left to punish," Frank pointed out. "Agent Orange is dead, Schoonover is dead, Billy's still catatonic and in Homeland's custody. There's no one left. I'm not some fuckin' superhero, I'm not Red, I don't go flingin' myself out of windows and getting blown up for fun. I had business, and that business's done now."

"You sure about that?" David said, frowning. "There's more evil in this world than just Agent Orange and Kandahar drug smuggling rings, Frank. And you're... I know you've been looking for something to do with your life, but I don't see you settling down with a nice job sweeping floors or painting walls for a living, so what're you going to do when you go stir crazy and all you want to do is go deal with some guys and she's still in your bed?"

Frank glanced across at Karen. She was still fast asleep, so he looked back at David. "Not gonna happen."

"Okay, well what happens if someone like Wilson Fisk gets out of prison," David said. "There's been chatter, Frank. The feds want his help, they'll do anything to get it."

Frank glanced over at Karen. He knew enough about her past with Fisk to know she'd be in danger if he got out of prison. But maybe with Murdock and Daredevil both dead, maybe he wouldn't come for her. Maybe she'd be safe.

On the other hand, would Frank feel good about just leaving him out there somewhere to wreak hell on his city?

"Ah, shit," he muttered and scrubbed a hand down his face, leaning against the counter. "Monitor it." He looked back at David. "Keep an eye out, listen for chatter. If Fisk gets released... I want to be the first to know about it. I want to know about it before _Fisk_ knows about it."

"I can do that," David said. "I'm always monitoring everything. I keep an eye on Billy, Madani, Fisk... Luke Cage." Frank gave him a funny look. "He took over a club recently, looks like he'll be the next big player in Harlem."

"As long as he doesn't come to this part of the city he can play whatever he likes," Frank said and set his gaze back on Karen. "I'm busy."

"All right." David picked his iPad back up. "Sarah's expecting me for dinner, so..."

"Yeah, go," Frank said. "Say hi to the kids for me."

"Will do!" David shot him a smile and let himself out, the door swinging closed behind him with a bang louder than Frank would've wanted.

Karen jerked awake, mumbling, "No Kevin, don't go!" as she came around. He watched her as she figured out where she was, blue eyes flicking between the clock, the sofa and finally landing on him. She settled down, shoulders relaxing, and let herself lie back down along his bed, somehow taking up all of it with her skinny frame, curled up on her chest with her head closest to the edge of the bed.

"You know," Frank said as he ambled over, "most people sleep with their heads at the top and their feet at the bottom."

"'m not most people." She struggled her way upright, sitting up to look at him. "Did David leave?"

"Yeah, door slamming woke you." Frank sat on the bottom corner of the bed. "How're you feeling?"

She smacked her lips a few times. "Something died in my mouth, and thirsty, but..." She rubbed at her face. "A little better...? Maybe."

"Good," he said softly. He gestured at the bathroom. "Your stuff's in the bag in there, I saw a toothbrush and shit like that. Wanna brush?"

He watched her hesitate, visibly weighing her energy levels against how much it would require to drag herself over there and into the bathroom. 

"I'll bring a bottle of water and a bowl over?" he said. "You can do it here?"

She looked back at him, surprised, but shook her head. "No, Frank, that's... but thank you." She shifted to the edge of the bed and he stayed vigilant, waiting to catch and support her if she needed it. She struggled to her feet, swaying there for a moment, and he kept his eyes on her as she stabilised. 

"I don't think I had this much trouble walking when I was a _baby_ ," she grumbled under her breath. "You must think I'm--" She didn't get to finish her sentence, Frank clicking his tongue and making shushing noises under his breath.

"None of that," he said and got to his feet. "Thought we discussed this already." He looped an arm around her so she could lean against him, but didn't offer any more support than she needed. Her head found a place against his shoulder and she nodded there, making tired sounds under her breath. "How long does the fatigue last?"

She sighed a bit and started moving again, using him as a crutch as she stepped for the bathroom. "I don't remember," she said. "I moved into my dorm and I remember crashing into my bed and I didn't move for days, until I was so desperate for water I crawled to the bathroom down the hall."

He had a feeling that was about ten years ago. He considered where he would've been, then. Probably in an active military zone, or if he was home he would've been eating with his family, or taking them to the park, or the carousel. It was an odd thought, that someone so important to him could be struggling so much and he would have no idea, no clue that one day he'd risk death just for her, over and over, take bullets for her, help her to the bathroom in his apartment just because he cared. 

He could conceptualise in his head that while he was with his family, David was with his. He could imagine sitting at a Thanksgiving meal in Hell's Kitchen, with Maria by his side and his kids fighting over stuffing, and know that across the city David was doing the exact same thing, Leo arguing with Zach over something silly, Sarah holding David's hand or watching as he carved a turkey.

He didn't know how to conceptualise something so radically different being Karen's reality, something so far disconnected from the warmth of his own. Even when he was deployed, with only a few exceptions, he was surrounded by people he cared about, who cared for him too. He had family by his side, even if he didn't know they were traitors yet, even if he didn't know what was coming. 

It was hard to believe Karen, his Karen, had no one.

"Frank," she said and he realised he'd zoned out, going somewhere deep in his head and moving on autopilot. "Frank."

He looked at her, blinking a couple of times to try and claw his way back to the surface, back to reality. "I'm here," he said gruffly. "Was just thinking." He helped her over to the sink and she leaned there, taking a moment to breathe.

"Yeah?" she said. "What about?"

He almost didn't tell her, almost didn't want to make her feel worse, but he wanted-- no, he _needed_ Karen to start letting him in. It was only the last couple of days that he'd realised how far shut out he was from what went on inside her head and inside her life. She knew everything about him and he was desperate for any scraps of information about her that she threw his way. 

"I, uhh." He leaned in the doorway, kept one watchful eye on her as she went through the bag on the toilet lid, found her toothbrush and toothpaste. "My head gets..." He gestured at it, tried to make his wobbly hand convey his meaning. "Swept away? Uhh, it's hard for me to... imagine."

"Imagine?" She looked over at him, a small frown creasing her brow. "You don't have an imagination anymore?"

No, that was wrong. "Uh," he said. She turned back to brushing her teeth and for the first time he realised she gave him chance to think, just like he was giving her when she was having trouble processing too. _Oh_. "Not quite," he said. "It's uh... y'know when you're cold? And you get all... imagining being warm again?"

"Yeah," she said. 

"S'harder for me," he said. "I get trapped in whatever I'm... experiencing? Or... whatever I get thinkin' about."

She frowned a bit, looking over at him. "That must be rough."

He shrugged. Not what he needed to hear. Reality was reality. "But, uh. You said 'bout college? Ten years or so, yeah?"

"Fourteen," she said with a shrug. "But close enough."

Didn't seem that close, but it didn't change much of what he was thinking about. "It's hard for me to, uh... think 'bout being cozy with my family, while you were going through this on your own. Not being there for you."

Her brow furrowed up deeper and she pulled her toothbrush from her mouth. "You didn't know me then."

"No, I know that," he said quickly. "That's the point, I guess. For a long time it was like every day was that day my family died, it..." Christ, why was talking so hard when it was about himself? He could talk for hours about Maria and the kids, go on and on about revenge and wanting to splatter the heads of anyone who ever touched anyone he loved wrongly, but talking about his own problems? It felt insurmountable. "It's like waking up every day to the same sunrise. Took me a lot of, uh... conscious effort to get out of that. So, when I think about... happy times, my... it puts you there, somewhat? David, too. Curtis. 'n it... gets confusing. Knowing you weren't there, that... you were fighting battles I didn't even knew existed, then. 'cause... I should've been there, because in my memory, you're there. Y'know?" There was absolutely no chance that she knew what he was going on about.

He wanted to hit something.

"I think I get it," she said. "It's hard for me to imagine a time I didn't know you, or Matt, or Foggy, but I... have a firm grasp of what was then, what's now, stuff like that. If it's all a bit mixed up together, I... imagine it can get confusing."

He waved his hand around. "Point is," he said. "I got lost in the mix. Couldn't imagine you not bein' okay when I _was_ okay. Can't imagine you not bein' okay when I _am_. I can get around it, but..."

"But sometimes it pulls you under like a wave." That was the first thing that really hit the nail on the head and he shrugged in discomfort, but the look on her face said she was speaking from experience, so he looked at her quizzically, almost desperate for her to give him something, _anything_ more than he already had. She went back to brushing her teeth, spat toothpaste into his ratty sink that he really should clean, and found a glass to rinse her mouth with. He waited. 

"I get it," she said after a minute. "I dunno what your exact experience is like, I wouldn't pretend to, but I get it. You relax for a moment or you... stop having something to focus on, and the thing just... engulfs you. It drags you down and you lose sight of what's the surface and what's the ground. For me it's..." She wiped her mouth with a towel from the bag. He didn't do her the disservice of finishing a sentence they both knew the end of. "You get lost and it feels like you'll never break the surface again."

"As long as I've got hard facts in front of me, I can process," he said. "I lose those and I struggle." There was nothing he hated more than admitting to weakness, but here she was, brushing her teeth in his bathroom because her weakness had come back and overwhelmed her too. If she could be brave enough to stand here and admit her struggles, so could he.

She put the towel down and he held a hand out for hers. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get you back to bed."

Her eyes landed on his hand, offered out so casually like it meant nothing at all, and a hint of a smile touched her lips as she took it. She stepped up to his side, slid her hand up until her arm wrapped around his elbow, and he walked her back to the bed in comfortable silence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In other news, I watched Venom with my mom today on my day off. Oh my god, we loved it. Such a great movie. However, I came away from it and all I could think about was an AU where Karen is Eddie and after Frank survived being shot in the head he was put through Deadpool-esque experiments and ended up a symbiote that way and just... Venom!Frank symbioted up with Karen. Maybe I'll write it some time, but I wanted you guys to appreciate the thought of that with me. 
> 
> Also, while I was writing this, my chrome turned on insert so I couldn't go back and edit at all while I worked. I ended up writing things I wanted to add into notepad and ctrl+c ctrl+v'ing it in because insert wouldn't turn off. Why is this a thing? Can it not be a thing, please?
> 
> (ETA: I hit post on this and I glanced up and WHEN THE FUCK DID THIS HIT 30K. I've done 30k in 8 days. Jesus CHRIST.)
> 
> (ETA2: ALSO Idk if I'm going PLOTTY with this (the Fisk references, Billy references etc) in a DDS3 rewrite or Punisher way, or if it's just "frank you're hardly going to stop, frank" sort of thing, so don't get too nervous about that yet ♥♥)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been half dead for a few days, everything's been Hard[tm], but I'm keeping my 4thewords streak and this is the easiest thing to write, so I'm adding 444 words at least to this every day, so you guys should keep getting chapters :3 don't worry about that.
> 
> I've raised the rating to M because of the drug use and a bit of violence. It feels better that way.

He found her with the biggest needle he'd ever seen, filled with more than he'd ever imagined. Sprawled out on the bed, she injected the drug into her arm, tossed her hair back, parted her lips. It was almost orgasmic and he couldn't tear his eyes away, scrabbling, clawing at the glass between them.

She started to sag, body losing its strength, arm falling away, needle rolling out to the floor. Blood poured from the vein she'd pierced, a steady stream of her life trickling away down her skin. Her blue eyes closed. He screamed and screamed but she couldn't hear him. She went still. He kept screaming for her, hands bloodying from pounding on the glass. He couldn't get to her. He--

"Hey, hey, Frank, Frank."

He was awake before he knew it, one hand gripping the back of the sofa he was sprawled over. Karen was by his side, kneeling on the floor, hands on his upper arm, her fingers wrapped around his bicep, the heat from her skin seeping in through his sweater.

She didn't speak once he was awake, and he darted his gaze between the door and the window, over to her, down to her arms, up to her face. She looked tired still, but her blue eyes were crystal clear, her pupils wide from the lack of light in his apartment, but not blown, or contracted.

He let out a puff of air and sagged back onto the sofa. He scrubbed his hand down his face.

"Were you dreaming about your family?" she asked softly. Her hands took up gently stroking his arm, in a soft, rhythmic, so very soothing pattern.

"Yeah," he grunted and let his head settle back onto the arm of the sofa. "I was." He closed his eyes again, focusing on his breathing to center himself. He was having a nightmare, that was all. She was safe, safe in his apartment, away from needles and drugs and whatever else that tempted her or tried to hurt her. It wasn't going to come true.

He felt dirty for how his mind had imagined her and he kept his eyes closed, even as he felt her stand beside him and move away. He kept one ear on her, listened in case she fell or struggled. He heard the kitchen tap run, a glass fill, then another. He didn't open his eyes, didn't know how to look at her or meet hers. 

"Frank," she said and he had to, so he opened his eyes and looked over at her. She'd knelt down by the sofa again and she was offering out a glass of water, which he took, hand shaking slightly. If she noticed, she didn't pass comment. She just smiled and buried her nose in her own glass, and he took a few gulps of his, grateful for the ice cold liquid to distract him from the heat of panic that the dream had settled over him. 

He'd been sweating, he realised. He'd shower, later. He hadn't since she'd barged in on him, but it'd only been a day or two. He'd been too focused on her needs to pay much attention to his own. 

"You, uh..." He sat up a bit, rested the glass against his thigh. "Y'seem to be feeling better?" He gestured at the glasses, not to mention the fact she was out of bed and by the sofa without his help.

"Yeah." She smiled a bit. "Woke up feeling like I'd actually rested for once."

He nodded, scraping one blunt fingernail against the edge of his glass. "Good, s'good." 

"I'm here if you want to talk about it," she said after a second, and he glanced at her. She wasn't looking at him. "The dream, I mean. I have nightmares too. I'm happy to listen."

"Kevin," he said and she looked at him in surprise. He shrugged one shoulder. "You, uh, talk in your sleep." He paused. "Do I?"

"No," she said. "You just grunt and thrash."

He nodded. "Seems like me."

She laughed softly and sipped her water. 

"So..." He hesitated. "Who's Kevin?" Another name he didn't recognise, the first being Todd, whoever that fucker was who'd hurt Karen so long ago. If he was still alive having been shot by her, Frank wanted to track him down and shoot him again. 

"My brother," she said. "Kevin. That's my brother."

"Oh." That made sense, he supposed. Siblings were hard for him to fathom, he'd never had any himself. It was difficult for him to imagine growing up with any, much like it was hard for him to imagine her being in trouble when he was okay. "The one Todd beat up?"

"Yeah, that's him." She got back to her feet. He felt the cold settle back over him as she drew away, both physically and emotionally. 

"You, uh," he said, sitting up further, scratching at the back of his head. She sat down on the end of the bed. "You never spoke about him before."

"Not to you," she said.

Well, that hurt. 

"Fair enough," he grunted and she looked up, eyes widening.

"Oh, no, Frank, I didn't mean it like--"

"No, it's fine," he said. "S'none of my business 'n all."

"I've never told anyone about him," she said. "The only one who knows is Ellison and that's because he dug into my past." She didn't look away and Frank forced himself to keep eye contact, no matter how much he wanted to avert his gaze. "I'm surprised you've never had David--"

"I don't invade your privacy." 

She let out a sigh and moved across, pushing his legs off his own sofa - "Hey," he grumbled beneath his breath - and sitting down beside him. "I don't care," she said. "Not with you."

"Right," he muttered.

"Frank," she said quietly. "Do you know why I've never told anyone?" 

"No." He wasn't trying to ice her out, but his skin was pricking with cold and it was all he could do not to get off the sofa and walk away from her. She knew everything about him, _everything_ , he'd told her everything, he'd let her in to every minute detail of his damn life and where were they now? Here. He'd let himself get soft and now it hurt. He hurt. And not in any way he was capable of handling. 

"Because they never _asked_."

That surprised him and he looked at her again, slower this time, like she might take a blade to his eyes. "Murdock?" 

"Nope."

"Nelson?"

"No."

He pulled a face. "Fuckin'..."

She shrugged. "But I don't know if I would've told Matt if he did," she said after a moment. "He... He never would've looked at me the same way, and I'd created this little house made of sticks and spit and twine and in that house I was perfect and the idea of knocking it down with the truth." She shook her head. "Couldn't imagine it."

"Nelson?" he muttered again.

"For all Foggy's been through since I met him, he... he doesn't have the same kind of darkness in him, or in his past, not like we do."

He rubbed the heels of his hands down his thighs and leaned back, weighing words against scaring her off. "I'm not gonna pry," he said, "or poke or press. You ain't me, you don't gotta act like you are, talk 'bout your shit, but uh..." He looked over at her. "If you want to tell me, I'm always gonna listen. I ain't the kind to judge you for the shit in your past."

He watched her tense up a little and felt himself frown. "Karen?"

"I know that, Frank." She moved away, left the sofa and went back over to the bed, sitting down. "You shouldn't sleep on there. You're too tall for it."

"I'm fine," he said.

"I'll swap you?" She shrugged. "I'm feeling better, and it's your bed..."

"We're the same height," he pointed out, "give or take. You'll be hanging off the sofa too."

"Okay, but it's _your_ bed," she said again. "I'll just sleep on the floor."

"I can sleep on the floor," he said.

"But you're on the sofa," she pointed out, like it was some kind of _gotcha_.

"It's comfier than the floor and I'm used to sleeping in tight spots." He swung his legs back along the sofa and lay back, head on the arm. "See? I'm fine." He shut his eyes to make a point.

"You're having nightmares is what you are," she grumbled and he heard movement, her getting closer. He held his ground until her hand lifted his head. He started to complain and then she shoved a pillow under it. "At least have that."

He'd known for a while - probably since she'd crossed the line in the hospital - that Karen Page wasn't in any way afraid of him, that in fact she seemed to think he should be more afraid of her than the other way around, but this was the moment that proved it: her manhandling him on his own sofa.

He grumbled at her under his breath, scowled and huffed like he could scare her off if he tried hard enough (clearly he couldn't), but he settled down onto the pillow, turning so he could look at her as she made her way back to bed and climbed back in. "Got stuff to show you tomorrow."

"Stuff?" She curled up the wrong way around on the bed again, spread across it lengthwise. She had the pillow at the side of the bed, her legs tucked up to her chest, and she was watching him. He considered offering to turn the bed ninety degrees, but he had a feeling she'd just sleep the wrong way around then too. It was a strange quirk, something he'd have no idea about if he hadn't seen her in such an intimate way. 

It made him smile that he knew, just a little.

"Yeah," he said. He gestured over at the fridge. "Calendar."

"Calendar?"

Was she just going to repeat everything he said for the rest of the conversation? 

"Yeah!" He rolled his eyes, shoving one fist up beneath the pillow under his head and watching her. "We can track y'progress, like, uh... how many days you've stayed clean, 'n... make some goals. Milestones! Stuff to aim for."

"Maybe we should do that for you too," she hummed, playfulness in her tone, "x-days since last murder spree."

He threw a sofa cushion at her and she let out a laugh when it hit her in the face and tossed it off the bed. "You gonna take this shit seriously or what? Just 'cause you're feelin' better doesn't mean you can slack."

"Uh _huh_." She rolled onto her stomach, head on the pillow, looking over at him. "I'm taking it seriously, Frank. I'm not-- I'm not going to let you down."

He didn't know if internal organs could make noises, really, but he was pretty sure one of his made a squeaking, cracking, slightly shattered noise. He sat up a bit. "Hey, no, this ain't about me," he said, frowning across at her. "Y'not supposed to be, uh... focusing your recovery on doin' it for someone else, y'know? It's supposed to be for you, f'... for wanting to do better, or be better, or be clean and doin' world stuff again."

She didn't sit up too, she just met his eyes quietly across his dark room. "What're you living for?"

The question caught him off-guard and he faltered, going silent. She didn't press, giving him time to think. What _was_ he living for? He'd lost his family, then he'd avenged them. Everyone who'd ever looked at them wrong, let alone pulled a trigger or ordered a hit on them was dead, they were all gone and dealt with. The only one that wasn't _dead_ was Billy, and he was catatonic which was a much better punishment, in Frank's eyes, than death, at least for him. 

(And maybe, maybe a little piece of him didn't know how to finish Billy off. Maybe a little piece of him didn't know how to end the life of a man he'd once called family. He'd had no real attachment to anyone else, Agent Orange hadn't meant jack shit to him, Schoonover was important in one way or another but he wasn't family, he wasn't _Billy_ (or Curtis, David, Karen, any of them). Maybe he just didn't know how to end the life of someone he loved, still loved maybe, hated as much as he could hate anyone (and that was a lot), but loved. Past and present mixed up together in his fucked up head to make a big mess of bullshit feelings he didn't know how to handle. He'd had no chance to handle. No one had ever talked him through handling.) 

Was he still alive because Billy was? Did he want to make sure if he somehow healed from what Frank did to him, crawled out of his bed, ripped off his bandages and broke free from Homeland security that Frank was there to-- Kill him? Send him back to hell? _What?_

That didn't seem right.

Whenever David had talked about going home to his kids, it was a goal for Frank too: get David home safe. Even if Frank ended up hiding all four of them out somehow, making them all disappear, faking their deaths in the end like David had faked his, he was _going_ to get David reunited with his family. That was it. That was the deal.

But where was his journey taking him? It wasn't to an After, like Karen had said. It wasn't to some white picket fence with a whole new wife and kids, it wasn't to a dog and a minivan and some kind of nine-to-five office job. 

There was no _After_ for him. 

And yet, when he got done, when he finished up with his business, when he'd been handed Pete Castiglione on a silver platter and David had given him money, siphoned from Billy's off-shore accounts ("It seems fair," he'd said, "that you should have this." Frank had argued, but in the end David had just said, "I need you to have it. I need to know I gave you something in return." He had no idea, did he? No idea at all.) he'd kept on living. He'd continued to exist, floating away into some odd kind of life where he had an apartment, and was considering (somewhat) getting a dog, and reading books, and buying black coffee from a little place down the street run by a blonde woman that never failed to make him smile.

(Oh, she _did_ look a little like Karen, didn't she? He supposed that had something to do with it.)

He'd just... kept living. He didn't have a _for_ , he didn't have a _goal_. He didn't have a purpose or people to kill or business to deal with. He just had... life. He was just _alive_ , because he wanted to be. Because he wasn't yet ready to shuffle off this damn mortal coil and leave everyone he cared about behind.

And he was damn glad he'd stayed, because where the fuck would Karen have been had he not?

"Right now?" he said, looking back at her. She'd been patient the whole time, wide awake with blue eyes sharp and focused on him, but not pressing. He wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve that level of patience from someone like her. "I'm livin' for getting you clean and looked after."

She smiled a little. "So if you can live for that, why can't I get clean for you?"

He offered her a good-tempered little scowl. "Ahh, hell," he muttered. "Go back to sleep." He rolled his back to her on the sofa, hunkered down with one arm wrapped around himself. She didn't demand he turn back over, or speak, so he huffed a few times. "Got a pitbull calendar. Y'like dogs?"

"Yeah," she said. He could hear the smile in her voice. It made him happy but also want to pull faces at her because god _damnit_ woman, he wasn't looking to get entrapped into _well I guess you can get clean for me if I'm living to get you clean, can't you?_

"Yeah?" he muttered.

"I love dogs," she said. "I've never had one though."

A pause. He turned back over slowly. "No? Y'family not have one?"

She shook her head. "Nah. My, uh..." She scratched at her nose, one hand poking out from under the heavy blankets on his bed. "My mom died? When I was... She had cancer. We... poured all the money into medical bills for her. Kevin was just a little too young to remember everything, but uh... I was old enough. Difference between nine and eleven, I guess. He remembered, don't get me wrong, but not as much."

 _Remembered_ , the word stuck out like she'd hung Christmas lights from it. Past tense.

"But, uh... We were pretty broke after that. The hospital bills were too much, and the diner wasn't turning a profit, so there was no way we could afford a dog," she said. "Couldn't even afford dad."

He snorted at that but only a little. "What kinda dog would you've gotten?"

"Me or my family?" she said.

"Both," he said. "Two breeds!"

"Family... Probably a golden retriever or something," she said. "Mom loved those kinds of dogs. Just... big fluffy puppy dogs that live to make you happy. More likely to smother you in their fur than anything else. If we had a family dog it probably would've been one of those."

"And you?" he said.

"Rescue," she said. "Something like an ex-fighting dog or a greyhound. One of the ones they treated like shit that need a home." She shrugged. "Probably an ex-fighting dog."

He wasn't sure why the fuck he was smiling but he couldn't seem to turn it off so he just let it happen. She probably couldn't see it much in the darkness anyway.

"Been thinkin' of gettin' another pitbull," he said. "I, uh, had one. Couple years back, I found one. Was the pet of the Kitchen Irish. I just got him in trouble though."

"Sounds like he was already in trouble to me," she said gently. He shrugged. 

"Eh, but I'm..." He gestured at the apartment. "Figured I could get a dog now, maybe." He looked over at her. "Ex-fightin' dog?"

He hadn't realised the implications of asking the woman he was currently practically living with whether he should get the dog _she_ wanted, but also he wanted, until the words were out of his mouth.

"Sounds good," she said before he could take them back. "Maybe that can be a milestone for both of us."

He snorted. "Yeah, well, if y' fall off the wagon I'm goin' too. Gonna put a bullet in whoever sells to you." He rolled away again. "So bear that in mind."

"Oh, I will, I promise," she said and he could hear her smiling again so he just ignored her this time. His murderous promises were not supposed to make her _smile_ , damnit. Although he supposed saving her from Lewis, taking bullets for her, and generally using his murderous nature to look after her might have something to do with that. 

"Night, Karen," he muttered.

"Night, Frank." She was still smiling. He was too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the start of this chapter on my phone into Google Keep when I was supposed to be sleeping, and I've been SO EXCITED TO POST IT EVER SINCE AGH even though I have no idea when Karen's mom died. There's so little information to work with, oh my god.
> 
> ALSO!!! Everyone's always enthusiastic over "THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED" but c'mon, c'mon... intimate room sharing with one on the sofa and the other in the bed still having Intimate Bedtime Conversations. C'MON!!!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOF, guys, I'm sorry this took longer to get out this week! My sleep pattern shifted dramatically and I write better in the daylight, it seems, but I was SLEEPING THE DAY AWAY. Anyway, hoping the length of this bad boy will make up for it. *slaps the roof* THIS BOI CAN HOLD SO MUCH FLUFF. I hadn't realised I was writing copious amounts of syrup until my teeth started to hurt.

"I need some stuff from my place."

Halfway through cooking breakfast for them both - finally somewhat regaining his memory of how to do the more domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning - Frank looked across at Karen, who was buttoning up her shirt, sitting on the edge of his bed. She'd taken a shower with his help to get her into the bath and out again, and her hair was clean and her clothes were fresh. She looked more like herself than she had in days. 

He was concerned it was a front.

"What stuff?" he said, trying not to seem as suspicious as he felt. "I sent David over to take out all the--"

"Not that," she said, but he saw her knee jiggle slightly as she tried to fight whatever urge was begging for it. "Laptop. Some books and stuff. Your apartment's lovely, but if I have to just sleep through another day with nothing to _do_ with myself, I'm going to go crazy."

"Yeah I get it," he said, serving omelettes up onto plates for them both. "You've never struck me as the kind to sit around and do nothing."

"I dunno what I'll do," she said, "Ellison still has me on sabbatical, but maybe I can get some freelance work or I can... I don't know. Maybe he'll give me remote work if I ask him nicely enough."

"I could go convince him," Frank suggested airily, putting two plates down on the island by the little stools. "He'd still recognise me." He was joking, obviously. There was no way he'd go threaten, beat up or shoot Karen's boss, but if she asked him to, he might stand in the doorway and look threatening while she asked him for work. It might just help.

"No," Karen said, getting to her bare feet and taking a few slow steps across towards the island. She sat on the stool and Frank smiled at her, putting a couple of glasses of water down. "He doesn't need punishing. I wasn't doing my best work, I can't blame him for..."

"Aht," he said. She shot him a glare and pretended to stab her food as though it were him. He stifled a laugh, coming around the island to sit beside her. "Don't put yourself down. You were having a rough time. My rough time landed me in prison, remember?"

"Twice," she said. "And hospital."

He rolled his eyes and pointed a bite of omelette at her on the end of his fork. "Twice."

If she wanted to question it, she didn't. He wasn't convinced she hadn't been keeping tabs on him after they'd seen each other last. He thought he'd been keeping tabs on her, after all, until it all went to _hell_. Yet another person he'd let down. He was just damned lucky she wasn't dead too, not that she hadn't come close.

She snapped her fingers once in front of his face and he came back to reality, looking across at her as his eyes refocused. "Wherever you went, it's okay," she said, "stay here with me."

He felt a smile tug at his lips and he waved his fork at her plate. "Eat up," he said. "We'll go get your stuff."

They spent the next few minutes eating, both staying quiet, and he was struck by the devastating realisation that after only a few days he was _used to this_. Him and Karen sitting side by side at a table, eating breakfast and being domestic. He was used to it, and thirty weeks from now he'd be even _more_ used to it. Thirty weeks from now it might just kill him to let it go. 

Thirty weeks was a damn long time to get attached to someone, just to let them go back to their life without you. 

He finished his meal second, Karen wolfing down the omelette he'd made like it was the nicest thing she'd ever eaten, and she finished her cup of tea off next, shooting him a smile. "You're a good cook."

He felt the urge rise to wave that off, to say, "Nah," or insist that no, no, the good cooks were his wife, or Curtis, or that he was just following a recipe, but instead he smiled awkwardly and said, "Yeah, well, I like cooking."

Surprise danced over her face and it almost made him extra happy to _surprise her_. She'd always waved his secrets in his face, dug them all up out of hiding, known things he'd never told her, so it was nice to be able to catch her off guard with something harmless, maybe even impress her. "It comes through," she said, "in the soup, too. You'd almost forgotten how to make it but it still tasted like..." She trailed off and stopped. He never got to find out where her sentence was going. "Anyway, can we..."

"Yeah." He got to his feet and put the dishes by the sink. He'd wash them later, but they could sit, for now. He didn't have to be a neat freak _all_ of the time. 

When he turned back she was pulling on her flats, hair tucked behind her ears, and she had a small smile on her face he didn't know the origin of. "Ready?" he said.

She nodded. "Yeah. It, uh... it was real nice of David to bring my stuff for me."

"Yeah, he's a real nice guy," Frank said, "but try spending twenty-four-seven with him for a few months, you'll want to punch his lights out." 

"Did you?" she said, with a small grin. 

"Only once, 'cause he was drunk an' gettin' in my way," Frank said matter-of-factly.

"Frank!" Her tone was scolding, but she was laughing, so he called that a win.

"Ehh!" He waved that off as he headed over and opened the door for her. He grabbed his jacket off the hook as she came over. "He's fine. No permanent damage."

"You can't just knock people out," she said fondly, stepping out. He shut the door behind them, locked it tight. He didn't always do that, sometimes he just left his door because... what was the worst that could happen, really? Someone breaks in and steals his one bottle of booze and his guns? Anyone who opened his closet, saw his guns and didn't immediately leave could fucking have them in his book, they were braver than they knew. 

Of course, if they used them to hurt people that didn't deserve it, he'd have to track them down. But no one had ever broken into his place and stolen his guns, so he'd never had to do anything like that. Now, though, Karen's stuff was in his place too, her clothes and her essentials, and there was no way he was going to let her safe space get violated by outsiders. So, it was getting locked. He might even install a couple of new deadbolts, too. It wasn't like he lived in a warm and cozy neighbourhood. 

"Frank."

She brought him back to reality again and he glanced over at her, offering a crooked smile. "Here," he said and unlocked his car, opening the passenger door for her. She seemed amused as she got in, but he didn't question it, he just closed the door and got in the other side, starting the engine. 

She was shivering slightly, the spring weather too cool for her slim frame and the withdrawal she was still fighting. He kept an eye on her a moment, then when he stopped at a red he shrugged out of his jacket.

"Oh, you don't need to do that," she said quickly. 

He threw the jacket into her lap. "I'm not cold." He was a little chilly, but he wasn't _shivering_. Karen was shivering. Karen was not allowed to shiver, damnit. 

"'m I gonna find guns in here?" she teased as she unbuckled her belt and scooted forwards, slipping his jacket on. 

"Maybe a severed finger or two," he said dryly.

"I'll avoid checking the pockets then," she said.

"You can if you want," he said, out of nowhere even to himself. She looked at him questioningly as she pulled the jacket around her shoulders, the arms and back the perfect length for her but the shoulders far too wide. "I don't got shit to hide from you, s'all."

She settled back into the seat, put her belt back on, and nestled into his jacket, looking across at him with ridiculously soft eyes. He did not look back at her. Instead, he focused his gaze on the road and grunted, "What?"

"Nothing." Still so damn soft, yet he was never afraid of breaking her like he was with other people. 

"Seems somethin'," he grumbled. She didn't speak and he looked over at her. She was still watching him with the softest damn expression on her face. "Definitely seems like something'."

She stretched her feet out into the footwell. He didn't look at her bare legs. "He knew I had a problem," she said, looking at her own legs now rather than at him. 

"Kevin?" he said. He didn't even have to try and remember the name. 

"Yeah," she said, "but I didn't mean him. I meant my dad." His fingers tightened on the steering wheel, grasping it as though it'd stop him from psychically flaying her father alive. "Kevin knew I was dating a drug dealer, think he figured out I was using too. Dad knew. He didn't..." She scratched at her hair and watched out of the window. "He never gave a shit, yeah? He..." She shook her head. "And Matt, he's always been... protective of me, but he..." She looked around at him. "I just mean I don't think anyone else would look out for me like you do. Foggy, maybe, but he wouldn't know what to do with me, he's too..."

"Soft."

A strange look passed over her face and she rubbed at her nose, snuffling slightly. Her eyes were welled up, but she wasn't crying, and he wasn't going to press the issue until she did. "He's not that soft," she said, "but he's..." He watched her weigh her words, try and find the one she was looking for. "Innocent. He's just... innocent. World's more black and white than it is for us." She laughed under her breath. "Should've seen his face after he found out what went down at the Royal Hospitality. He came over, hammered on my door at like... ten PM." She had a smile on her face, the kind he didn't see very often. If she'd mentioned a brother before the name _Kevin_ , he would've thought she was talking about Nelson. "Held up the article I wrote when I let him in, demanded to know what the hell I was playing at. I made him coffee."

"At ten PM?" Frank said, voice dripping with the amusement he was feeling in his chest.

"It's not like he wasn't already wired," she said. "He asked the same as Ellison did, did I know you were alive. I didn't lie to him. He sat on my sofa and just... looked at me."

"Oh yeah?" he said.

"Think he was trying to work out if I was crazy," she said.

"What's your take on the matter?" He pulled the car into a lot near her apartment. 

"Jury's still out." She shot him a smile and he chuckled, lifting one shoulder in agreement.

"C'mon," he said and got out of the car. She followed suit and she fell into step beside him as they walked to her apartment. "So what was his decision? You crazy for being friends with me?"

She shrugged and he looked over at her. She looked better in his dark jacket than he did, that was for sure. "I don't think he really decided I was crazy," she said. "He muttered something about staying friends with Matt even though he was being an idiot all over the city beating people up, then he started to say something about Elektra and after that the conversation... degenerated a little." 

He offered her keys out and she took them, opening up the apartment door. "Elektra?"

"Matt's ex." She gave the keys back to him as they went inside, which he didn't question, and she led the way into her place and over to the sofa, near which she'd abandoned her laptop. There were bookshelves everywhere, papers strewn around. She was nowhere near as tidy as he was and he made a note to always clean up after her as long as she was staying with him. 

"The one he..." He couldn't finish the sentence, wasn't sure if he'd have to finish it with _died with_ or _cheated on you with_. Neither would exactly make her happy.

"Same one." She found a bag from by the sofa. "David put everything back exactly how I left it." She smiled a bit. "Tell him thanks from me?"

"Ehh, tell him yourself." He leaned against one of the bookcases, didn't want to touch a damn thing without her permission, and watched her gather up items, putting her laptop away and adding books to bags and other things. "He'll come by, and when you're feeling better I promised we'd go to dinner with him and Sarah and the kids."

She looked at him in surprise. "You... Really?"

He frowned. "What?"

"I'm an addict, you want to--" She hesitated. "It's okay to not want me around your friends or their family, Frank."

He looked at her in bemusement. "You're not just an addict," he said, "you're Karen. David's been on my ass about having you over for dinner since--" Since he'd called her Frank's girlfriend and Frank hadn't... _denied_ it. She wasn't his girlfriend, that was for sure, but he still hadn't put those words out into the universe in response, had he? "You were on the radio, I'd had him watchin' your window for the flowers so he knew I cared 'bout you, yeah? He heard you were on the radio and let me know, so." He waved his hand around. "I don't think we get a say in the matter anyway, but David has had me over for dinner a bunch of times since he got me to agree to it the first time and I'm the damn Punisher, I think as long as you don't hock their toaster for goods, we're fine."

"Not sure a toaster would cover my coke problem," she said. She picked her laptop bag up and he held a hand out. She smiled and gave it over to him, then went back to searching for other things to bring back with her while he watched.

"See, then we're fine," he said, "and their toaster's safe. Toaster's the only thing I cared about anyway."

She laughed under her breath and stacked some books up. He kept an eye on her.

"So, are y'like... bringin' the kitchen sink too or...?" he teased.

"Not sure it'd all fit in your car," she said and shot him a grin across the room. "I've got a couple of bags in my bedroom, in the back of the closet. Would you pack some more of my clothes into them? However much you think I'll need, however long you're holding onto me."

He nodded and put the laptop bag down by the front door, then wandered off to find her bedroom. The first thing he noticed upon walking in was it smelled like her, but stronger, probably from all the times she'd showered and immediately gone in there. It was a nice smell, flowery but not overpowering, and he smiled to himself, ambling over to the closet and opening it up. 

At the back were two duffel bags, and a suitcase. He eyed all three, considering for a moment, then hauled the suitcase out along the floor over to by the bed, and dumped the duffels on the top. 

He spent the next few minutes going through her closet and drawers, packing everything he found into the bags, regardless of practicality or necessity. He packed all of the underwear from one drawer, never looking too closely, the bras from another, the socks from the next one down. He emptied out the drawer of stockings, then followed it up with the rack of shoes she had on the floor of the closet.

Her clothes, every silk blouse and beautifully hung dress, he folded perfectly into the suitcase, careful never to damage any of them.

In the bottom drawer of her dresser, beneath her sweaters, he found a box. He remembered Maria had a similar box, just a box of trinkets and keepsakes. He asked once why she kept them in her drawer, under her clothes, and she'd shrugged and said, "No one looks there, but they're always on hand. It keeps them safe. I'd keep you in my drawer too if I could."

He cracked the box open, casting a cursory glance over to make sure David hadn't missed a drug stash, then put that in one of the small pockets of the suitcase, and then her jewellery box in another. 

He'd emptied everything in the bedroom out into the bags by the time Karen came in carrying a backpack. A look of surprise passed over her face and she leaned in the doorway. "You packed everything."

"Yeah." He straightened up from zipping her bag up. "You said get what you'd need, right?"

"For a few weeks!" She smiled at him, shaking her head in amusement. 

"Oh." He hadn't mentioned that to her, had he? He scratched at the back of her hair. "Uh, Curt said the first thirty are the most important, with cocaine." She looked at him in confusion. "Weeks. So... I..." It occurred to him he hadn't asked her if keeping her in sight for thirty weeks was okay by her or not. "Well."

Her eyes widened. "I'm staying with you for eight months?"

When she put it like _that_ it sounded like he definitely should've asked first. He doubled down instead. "Yeah. Gonna take care of you whether y'think y'deserve it or not."

She softened right down in front of his eyes and smiled. "Okay, well," she said and made a beeline for her dresser, "there's a box in here I want, I--" She opened the drawer and found it empty. "Oh, god, where--"

"Whoa, hey, sh," he said, detecting the panic as it rose in her voice. "I already packed it."

She looked around at him in surprise. "What?"

"You don't keep just... shit in your bottom drawer like that," he said and shrugged. "Just precious shit. So." He gestured at her suitcase. "It's in there."

Her eyes flicked between him and the suitcase. "Did you look in it?"

"No," he said quickly. "Just glanced for drugs."

She nodded a bit and picked one of the duffels up off the bed. 

"You don't have to do that," he said. "Here." He offered the handle of her rolling suitcase out to her and she took it. "You bring that, I'll bring the bags."

She smiled and nodded. "Okay, okay."

They took the bags outside together in one trip, Karen carrying her laptop bag and Frank the two duffels and backpack. He didn't ask to go through the things she'd packed, trusting a combination of David and Karen not to trip her up, and once the bags were loaded into the back of the car they settled back in, Frank drumming his thumb against the steering wheel.

"What is it?" she said.

"Figure it's gonna get worse before it gets better, ay?" he said, looking over at her. She nodded.

"Yeah, the withdrawal's easing but I..." She clasped her hands between her thighs. "It'll get bad."

He tapped out a tune against the wheel. "A'right, wanna get somethin' to eat before we go home then?"

Her head whipped around, the only indication that what he'd said was out of the ordinary. It took him a moment to process, figure out what it was that'd caused that reaction, and then he realised: home.

"Y-Yeah!" she said. "Yeah, that sounds good."

He was back to having two options again: retract his statement or double down once more. 

"Maybe we can swing by a store, get a plant or summat," he said. "Stick it on the windowsill, brighten the place up a bit for you." Doubling down it was. "If you want."

She hunkered into his jacket and smiled. "Yeah, I'd like that," she said. 

"All right," he murmured, "food. Plant. Then home."

"Okay," she said softly, and he'd be lying to himself if he didn't like the way that sounded.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still alive despite Christmas kicking my ass there and back. I spent all of Christmas Eve cooking. I have no idea what day it is. 
> 
> Also, I'd been trying to put BIG CHAPTERS up but then I realised chapters are better than no chapters, right? So this is a bit shorter, because it works. Hope you guys like it!

It was a couple of days later, the routine having rarely changed (wake up, make breakfast for the two of them, sit and read together, or write in Karen's case, occasionally chat about mundane yet comfortable things, exercise (Frank), nap (Karen), keep an eye on her as much as he could) that Frank was making lunch, considering going out to do laundry. He had extra clothes to wash now, after all, since Karen's things had been added to the mix, although he'd noticed that most of the time her pyjamas were just one of his shirts and a pair of underwear.

He'd not figured out how he felt about that yet.

He was just scraping scrambled eggs into the middle of the pan when Karen came over, leaning against the island. "So, uh," she said, "I was thinking."

He cut his gaze across to her. "Yeah?"

"Maybe instead of this cold turkey business--" He could see her fidgeting, one fingernail scraping lines across the countertop between them. "--maybe, maybe uh, maybe we could just... wean me off, yeah? I could go buy some and then we could slowly reduce my intake."

He took in the sight of her, fidgeting, wriggling, struggling, then looked back at the eggs, turning them over to cook more thoroughly. "No."

"Why?" she said in despair. "It's the better way of doing it. I've been researching."

There was something in her tone that told him she wasn't _lying_ but she was definitely stretching the truth. He figured she probably felt it was the better way because she was craving, so that was true, and that she'd been researching, although whether the research agreed with her hypothesis or not was anyone's guess. "No, Karen."

"Please," she whimpered. She folded herself over the island, burying her face into her forearms. "I'm going out of my _mind_ over here, I don't know if I can take it."

He served the eggs up onto two plates, sprinkling some salt and pepper over them, then put the plates on the island, further down from her arms. "Yeah, and that's what's talkin', eh?" he said. "Your uh, y'body's makin' your brain all confused. Head's saying it's okay t' say these things, want these things, when we already had an agreement, already knew how we were gonna get it done. You've been doing so well, you don't wanna ruin that."

"I've not though," she said. "I'm not doing well! It's only been a few days!"

He knew that, intellectually. He knew it'd only been a few days, but somehow it felt like she'd moved into his life and just... become it, become every facet and every inch of his life, of his soul. She was as much this apartment as the walls and floor were.

"No," he said and met her eyes, leaning against the counter on the opposite side from her and trying to strike a balance between scary Punisher Frank Castle and firm friend that was definitely not going to let her go fuck her clean streak up any time soon, if at all. She started to argue and he raised a hand, shaking his head. "Thirty weeks. Clean. Sober," he said. "You've started, so we're going to get you to that finish line. We knew it wasn't going to be easy, yeah? So, we're gonna do it anyway."

"I think tapering would be easier on both of us," she said, words all sliding together a little. "We can start me off with less than I was already taking and then taper it down to--"

"You just want a hit." It looked like he'd achieved that, as she reeled back like he'd struck her. "You want a hit and you're willing to say anything to get it. No." 

"I could just leave," she said, quiet and flat. "I could just go home."

"I'm not gonna letcha do that," he said. She looked at him sharply, surprise and maybe something a little darker in her eyes, and he shrugged. "You came lookin' for help, you were takin' heroin. If I let you walk out that door, buy more coke or whatever the fuck else you might buy, I ain't gonna see you again. Y'gonna walk out, and be gone. I'll probably hear about ya turning up dead in some ditch somewhere."

"Wouldn't do that to you," she said, but she picked at the edge of the counter island with her fingernails, all bitten down to the quick. "Just thought it'd help."

"You want a hit," he repeated and she looked away from him completely, freckled face turned towards the window. He could count each freckle from here, if he wanted to, all the ones she usually covered with a layer of makeup that so often looked like she was wearing nothing at all. He wondered when she'd picked that habit up, if she'd done it as some kind of defense mechanism from men who didn't appreciate her freckles, or if it was something more, something deeper. "There's no point denying or hidin' it, shit you'd call me on it so hard my head would spin if I said I didn't just wanna see the guys who hurt my family die, y'know that?"

"Yeah, I do," she said, eyes down like she was ashamed, like he was beating her up or some shit like that.

He shifted back and forth, moved around the counter island and over to her. "Hey, hey," he said and reached for her. She half flinched away, only half but enough that he left his hand very still, hovering by her bare elbow. "Karen, hey."

"Don't," she muttered, face turned away. 

"It's _okay_ ," he said. "Really. I know this sucks and you're probably embarrassed as fuck over it, but it's _okay_. We're gonna figure the whole lot out. Together."

She turned towards him slowly and he took that to mean he could get a little closer, his hand gently finding her elbow and tugging her towards him. "You don't have to," she muttered. "I don't know why you are."

He stared at her. She still had her eyes down, focused on some negative space between their chests, and he found his free hand reaching out, stroking back her hair from her face. "You kiddin' me? All you mean to me? All I owe ya?"

"You don't owe me anything," she said, frown creasing its way onto her forehead. She looked up at him, genuine confusion in her eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Shit, Karen, I owe you everything," he grumbled. "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. You reminded me 'bout my family, reminded me what I lost, what I was fightin' for. You kept me going. That was all you. I would'a just..." He made a gesture he hoped conveyed some kind of meaning along the lines of driving his car right off a bridge, whether deliberately or not, and shrugged. "I owe David as much. Both of you, you're... my family now. I owe you everything."

She went dead silent, elbow never leaving his grasp, and he felt panic swell up in his chest. He'd pushed too far, been too raw. He knew better, he--

And then she laughed. His eyes widened, probably comically to her, and he made a grunting sound in his chest. "Okay, wow."

"No, it's just," she said through the hysterical little giggles she was fighting off. "It's just! I... feel like I owe _you_. I _do_ owe you."

He squinted at her. Nope, that made no sense. She must be high, maybe he missed some coke. "What?"

"You've saved my life _how_ many times now?" she said. "Back when I was being shot at--"

"--because of me."

She gave him a withering look. "In the diner!"

"I set you up as bait," he pointed out.

"To kill the guys who were trying to kill me anyway," she said, "it wouldn't be _bait_ unless they were fishing."

He was pretty sure that metaphor didn't work. "Fine, I saved your life but you saved mine!"

"Schoonover."

"I plowed your car!"

"And saved my life!"

He huffed under his breath and turned away, but she pulled him back by his arm. "Lewis."

He grumbled something under his breath. "Yeah, well, if ya hadn't been there I wouldn't've found out Bill was--" He shook his head. "Maybe we can both just be squared up."

She rolled her eyes. "Sure, like you'd actually think that," she said.

"I could," he said. "Seems fair at this point. You think ya owe me f'not getting ya _completely_ killed--"

"'Completely killed'," she said, along with air quotes.

He pointed two fingers at her face. "--and I think I owe you f'not letting me rot in a god damn jail cell." Another laugh came bursting out of her, for which he was very proud of himself. "So maybe we can just be square. Start from scratch."

She worried on her lower lip, then nodded. "Then I still don't know why you're doing this," she said quietly.

"You're family," he grunted. "S'all it takes."

She opened her mouth, shut it again, and he found his hand petting her hair again, gentle as he could. "I get that family di'n't mean shit where y'from, clearly," he said, voice low and closer to a grunt than anything else, "but it means summat to me. So..."

"It means something to me too," she said gently.

Had he stopped to think about it for more than a moment, he probably wouldn't have actually done it, but then he was kissing her forehead, and then drawing away before he had time to panic. "Anyway," he said, "breakfast. With no drugs."

She huffed, but the dramatic air she adopted was clearly put on. "Fine," she said, "if you insist. But I'm filing a complaint with the management." She slid onto one of the stools, elbows rested on the counter. 

"Good luck finding management in this place," he grumbled and slid her plate in front of her, then put a knife and fork down either side of it. 

She grinned at him, her face bright, even though he could see the struggle she was coping with in her eyes. "Thanks," she said and dug into the food. He wasn't sure if she was just thanking him for the eggs.

"You're welcome," he said, for whatever it was she was thanking him for. For everything. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish this site had like a feed so you can post like "hey no im still alive i'm still writing pls help me i'm buried under cookie dough" and people know you haven't abandoned the fic that ate your brain.
> 
> Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! ♥ And I hope you have a great December, all of you.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm... i'm back??? 
> 
> Did you all think I'm dead? I thought I was dead for a while there! 
> 
> Long ass chapter to make up for how long I've been gone. Did you all enjoy Punisher S2? I've seen it so feel free to talk to me about it in the comments because BOI DID I ENJOY IT but I don't want to spoiler it here aside from saying Karen is still an angel and I love her and I would die for Frank Castle.

Karen couldn't sleep.

Frank was stretched out on the sofa, all long limbs and one arm thrown over his eyes like the light was too bright, and it felt wrong to wake him just because she was restless, bored and desperate for cocaine, so she sat quietly instead, watching him sleep.

She couldn't help but find it funny, that he was doing his best to make going out and getting a fix as unappealing and downright impossible as he could (she knew his door was locked, his window too, and the key was in his jeans pocket, which would be a little awkward to fish into, even if she _was_ desperate enough) and yet all it really took was falling asleep on the sofa, all limbs thrown everywhere and his face relaxed with sleep.

She'd kill anyone who disturbed him right now, even herself. 

She pulled her laptop over, careful to make as little noise as she could, and opened up the lid, rubbing the back of her hand along her nostrils and blinking hard as her blurry vision adjusted to the bright light of her screen. 

She opened up a new email and typed Ellison's name into the To box, then glanced over at Frank, worried her typing would wake him. 

When he didn't stir, seemingly falling deeper asleep even, she typed out an email, begging for something to do, an article to write, a promise she'd even do the weather if that's what he really, truly wanted from her.

She didn't explain why she was desperate, at least she offered a casual, "I've come down sick, it's awful really, but if I don't find something to do I'll go crazy too," and left it at that. 

How did you explain to a man who'd become a father figure to you that you were jonesing for coke? 

Somehow it seemed easier to tell Frank these things. Everyone else she was terrified of disappointing, but Frank she knew she couldn't let down. 

He couldn't let her down either. 

Neither of them knew how. 

"Aren't you supposed to be restin'?" 

She startled so hard she nearly threw her laptop off the bed, clutching it with one hand and her chest with the other. "J-Jesus christ, Frank," she breathed out and slid her hand up over her mouth, eyes closing. "You're like a ghost, I swear to god."

"Perks of being dead," he said, and she fought the urge to throw a pillow at him. "Didn't answer my question."

"Can't sleep," she said, refocusing her eyes on her screen as she finished off her email. She didn't tell him she was staying with Frank Castle, she just offered a, "I'm staying with family until I recover," and felt no guilt for the lie that didn't feel like a lie, and ignored the feeling of Frank's stare. "What?" Unsuccessfully. 

"I'll keep you company." He hefted up off the sofa and she felt her shoulders fall and her heart do a flip. 

"No, Frank, c'mon," she said helplessly, *you need your sleep. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just..." She gestured at her laptop. "Go back to sleep."

"That's what someone who's goin' somewhere would say," he drawls and she'd get annoyed at him calling into question her honesty if she believed he wasn't teasing her. He sat down on the other side of the bed, then hesitated. "Unless you want some privacy, I can sit over there."

"Relax, Frank," she murmured, "I don't have anything to hide from you."

If she was a betting woman, she'd put money that the noise that escaped Frank's lips and nose was a soft one, almost appreciative, but she wasn't one to lay many wagers - finding her bets often came up a loser - so she let it go.

"I'm emailing Ellison," she said. "I've told him I'm sick and that I need something to occupy my time. He might send me some copy work or editing or..."

"Shit," he said and she didn't look over at him, refusing to acknowledge how well he knew her, but for once he was very clearly waiting for a reaction so she snorted to herself and looked around.

"What, Frank?" 

"Copy or editing," he said. "That's, uhh, like me taking up Uber driving. You'll die of boredom in a week. Less than a week."

She rolls her eyes. "It's better than not having anything to do while you're being Sleeping Beauty," she tells him, "and I think you'd make a great Uber driver. Scare all the guys who're taking some girl home to hurt her."

He seemed to consider that for a few long minutes. "I do need a job," he said. 

"Private security," she said and he made an iffy noise. She figured that was too much like Russo. "Bouncer. Bodyguard. Security guard. Cop."

He cut his gaze over to her. "Me? A cop?" 

"Lots of vets become police officers," she said. "Plus, imagine Matt's face when--" She stopped talking abruptly, her stomach sinking down to somewhere in her thighs, and she heard the little intake of breath that signalled Frank picking up on her abrupt change of mood. 

"Karen..."

She shook her head, licking her lips and taking a couple of short, sharp little breaths. This wasn't helping her cravings. 

He moved off the bed and her stomach dropped even further. Somehow Frank's presence helped keep her head above water more than anything else. Maybe that was why his sofa nap was so effective. 

"Frank--" She cut herself off before se could embarrass herself by begging him to come back and bit down on the inside of her lower lip. 

"Keep ya hair on, I'm coming back," he grumbled and for a second she was assaulted with the knowledge of exactly what it had been like to be Maria, to be married to Frank Castle, the man not the Punisher. 

"Fine," she said quietly, the best sass she could offer in return right now, and hit send on her email. 

He came back after a moment, clutching papers he'd printed off somehow. 

"What's this?" she said. 

"Research." He swung his legs back onto the bed and offered her some of the papers and she took them, thumbing through. 

Addiction. Most of it was repeating the same idea: don't detox a junkie alone, get them to rehab, and Karen opened her mouth but Frank waved his hand in her general direction. 

"You can ignore all that shit about rehab," he said, "'less you wanna go. I'll figure it out if you do."

"No," she said, then paused. "But if I get too much for you--" 

"Murder, suicide," he said, not even looking up at her. "Got it."

She wanted to laugh, or shout at him, or tell him that wasn't even funny, but all she managed was a weak little sound and the next thing she knew her head was on his shoulder and she was watching him go through the remaining papers, thinking about how similar they were from time to time. 

"What're we looking for?" she asked. He smelled good, like all the ways Frank always smelled that was so familiar and yet so intoxicating. 

"Found it," he declared and produced a sheet. "It's a worksheet!" 

This time she really did laugh. "What?" 

"Worksheet!" Either he thought repeating himself would help or he didn't believe it either. "For identifying your triggers."

"My--" She sat up, shaking her head. "I'm not a soldier, Frank. I don't have PTSD. Or triggers."

She watched him consider that for a moment, then he looked over at her and said, "How?" 

"What?" she said. 

"Fisk. The Blacksmith. Me shooting at you. Schoonover. Lewis," he listed off. "And those are just some o'the ones I know about. But no PTSD? How come?"

 _Car crash_ , said a little voice in her head. 

"Speak for yourself, Frank," she said. "How come you don't?" 

"Ah, shit," he muttered, "I probably do. Have enough nightmares that's for sure." He pointed at a section of the worksheet. "Nightmares." 

She followed his pointer finger, reading the section, and swallowed a few times. "Do it with me," came out of her mouth. 

"What?" 

She sucked in a breath. "I'm not trying to trap you into something, I just... can't do this alone," she said, voice quaking slightly. "Do it with me..." 

He hesitated, making a little sound in his throat that was almost like a scared doberman growling as it tried to figure out what to do. "Yeah, a'right," he muttered after a moment and tossed the worksheet across onto her laptop. "Fair's fair's 'n all."

She hesitated, guilt welling up in the pit of her stomach. "You don't have to," she said. "I know yours is going to be worse than mine. I don't know what I was thinking, Frank, I'm sorry..."

He looked over at her, eyes soft. "It's fine," he said gruffly, "don't be so panicky. That ain't you."

He wasn't _wrong_ exactly, but she definitely felt like a panicky individual when he was concerned, always afraid of chasing him off if she got too close. It's a miracle she got to see him again at all after what happened in the elevator, but maybe he didn't pick up on the fact that in the heat of the moment she nearly kissed him, that the only thing that stopped her was the blood covering his body, jarring her back to the terrible reality of their situation. 

She thought she'd never see him again after that, she really did. She was convinced he'd disappear and the next thing she'd know she'd get a call from someone, maybe Madani or Micro, telling her that Frank was dead for real this time. 

But here he was now, sitting next to her on his bed, talking about worksheets for PTSD and addiction and being so completely open with her, like he had no idea at all, or like he didn't care. 

It was an odd concept that maybe he didn't care she was going to kiss him, that maybe-- 

She scratched at the back of her hair and nodded. "Withdrawal," she said with a shaky smile. "Turning me into someone I'm not."

"Yeah," he said, still gruff as hell, "that's talked about on page four."

She made a little snorting sound of laughter under her breath and thumbed through the pages. Sure enough, page four talked about how addiction, specifically the desperate craving part, turns you into someone you're not, about how it turns trusted family members into thieves and liars, about how bad it can get.

Karen's eyes lingered on the words for a moment, vision blurring, then she took a breath and nodded. "Right," she said quietly. "Of course it is."

He looked over at her, worry in his eyes, and she tried to look away before he could search her own. "Hey," he said, "s'okay. We're handling it, remember?"

"Yeah," she breathed. "Yeah, I remember."

"Karen," he murmured and before she knew where she was he'd put his arm around her and she was curling up against the side of his chest on the bed, fitted perfectly under his arm, her cheek against his t-shirt. "We're handling this. We've _got_ this. S'okay."

She nodded a bit, pressing as close as she could, and Frank pulled the worksheet over, perusing it without letting go of her. "Course," he muttered, "this is for addiction."

"Yeah?" she said.

"I don't have an addiction!" 

She rolled her eyes. "We'll use your penchant for murder," she said. "I don't see why that wouldn't apply here."

He grumbled to himself. "Most of it says substances."

"Drinking the blood of your enemies," she said.

"What," was his response. "What? Do you think I'm some kind of vampire?"

She shrugged. "You might be," she said. "I've never seen any proof to the contrary."

He gave her a funny look, then looked away, then looked back at her again, head bobbing as he processed her latest round of teasing. "No proof that I'm not a-- a-- a-- vampire?" he said. "You've seen me around mirrors!"

"No longer have silver," she said.

"Cameras!"

"Also have no silver," she said.

He paused. "Hm," he said. "I might be a vampire."

"Let me find out," she decided and scooted further into his arms, wriggling across until her ear pressed to his chest and she could hear his heart pounding away beneath her. "Nah," she murmured after a moment, settling there. "You're fully human, Frank Castle."

He didn't speak, not for what felt like a good half an hour but probably was only two minutes if that, and then he kissed the top of her head in the softest way she'd ever known and shook his own a few times. She left him be, staying where she was and letting him process his way through whatever he was struggling with, until eventually he said, "Triggers."

"Right," she agreed and shifted her position to look at the worksheet. She should move, she knew that, but she didn't... want to.

"What makes you want to use?" he said.

She licked her lips, working on her own approach to this for a moment, and before she could reply he spoke again.

"Other than Murdock."

That drew a laugh from her and she sat up a little, still staying close to his warmth. "It's not... Matt _specifically_ ," she said, although sometimes - _sometimes_ \- it had been. "It's him being gone."

"Loss," he muttered and drew a line down the center of the worksheet, titling the top up with _F_ and _K_ , him first like he was taking the lead. He wrote _loss_ in both columns, scrawling out the words, and she watched them quietly.

"I feel like I should've done more," she said after a moment. "Like... it's my fault that he's gone, like it's my fault because I let him go to--" She licked her lips and tried to relax but all she wanted was a hit, like a desperate gnaw in her stomach. 

"Guilt." He wrote that for both of them too and she should question him, say he couldn't just copy her answers, but at the end of the day his answers were her answers, weren't they? They were the same in so many ways.

"Survivor's guilt," she said after a moment, taking in a deep breath. 

He frowned. "Y'weren't there with him, surely?" 

"No, he left me at--" She broke off and shook her head around a little, laughing in that broken way she always did when she was desperate not to admit to her pain. "I'm not talking about Matt. Well, maybe a little. But..." She scratched at her hair. "Mostly talking about my brother. I was in the car with him." She could feel Frank's gaze on her, even she was refusing to engage. "I was driving."

He expelled all the air he had in his lungs and was quiet for a moment. She knew he wasn't about to freak out, or judge her, or insult her, but she felt the anxiety rise nonetheless. "Shit, Karen. I didn't know."

"No one does," she said with a laugh. "Ellison. But that's because he background checked me."

"Respect," Frank muttered and she scowled at him. He rolled his eyes. "Always check up on your people." He paused for a moment, then looked at her. "Murdock..."

"Doesn't know," she said. "Foggy doesn't know. There's a lot of things they don't..." _Ask about_ , said her heart. _Don't be mean_ , argued her brain. "Matt's wrapped up in his own world, his demons and his angels and his fight, and Foggy's just..." She'd said all this before so she trailed off and said, "Was. Was wrapped up," instead.

"I never asked either," he muttered. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Frank," she said. "You've been busy." She hesitated, then drew back from the strange almost cuddle they were sharing to sit beside him and tuck her hair behind her ear. "It's not like we've ever done this before."

"Eh?" he said. "Done what?"

"Quiet time," she said. "It's always been diners about to get shot up and guns being fired and protecting me and elevators with shrapnel hanging out of your arm--" and didn't she always dream about that elevator? About all the ways that could've gone? "--and Lewis and--" She shook her head. "We've never really just spent time with each other, before."

"Didn't know you'd wanna," he said, quick enough that she was convinced he wouldn't have if he'd given it more thought. "Spend time with me just 'cause, I mean."

"I do," she said instantly. "I do, I did, I still do. I..." There were a lot of things she _wanted_ to say, to explain to him. Things about how she felt more at home with him in the diner than she ever felt sitting at Nelson & Murdock or listening to Matt's endless black and white morality or even hanging out with Foggy at Josie's. It wasn't that Matt and Foggy weren't home to her - they were, are, were, are, were? - it was just that she never felt as comfortable or safe there as she did with Frank.

Even if Matt hadn't cheated on her, even if he hadn't so very clearly been in love with someone else, she never would've been able to settle down with him, especially once she knew he was Daredevil. She would've laid awake night after night, wondering how long until the deal breaker happened, until she was tied to Wesley's murder and Foggy showed up to defend her but Matt was nowhere to be seen, off trying to rationalise his affection (love? Did he ever love her really? She'd loved him, she had, but he'd never... She didn't think he knew how to love _her_ ) against what she'd done and who she was, against the fact she shot first and asked questions later, that she _wanted_ Wesley to die, and wanted to be the one to kill him, that she woke from nightmares of Fisk getting vengeance against her but never from questions of her own morality or her own guilt: she knew who she was, and she was a woman who would defend The Punisher to the ends of the Earth because she was _just like him_.

"Hey," Frank's soft voice said, drawing her back to reality. "Where'd you go?"

"Uhh." She looked around at him, blinking a couple of times to clear her blurred vision. He was looking at her in such deep concern that her heart broke a little. "Nowhere." He gave her a look and she pulled a face. "I'd rather not talk about it, yet."

He nodded and looked back at the worksheet. "So," he said. "Next trigger?"

She thought about Matt, about his arguments about how Frank was just a monster, out for blood and with no remorse, about how he didn't care if a hundred people died because one was allowed to live because letting that person live was _the most important part_ , murder is never the right option, Thou Shalt Not Kill. 

"Judgement," she said after a long moment of thought. He looked around, surprised and curious, and she chewed on her lower lip. "Matt, he, uh... We didn't agree on a lot."

"No shit," Frank said and she wasn't sure if he meant in general or if he was shading the fact she was in his bed right now. She ignored him either way.

"We argued about you," she said and he looked at her, surprised all over again. 

"Oh?"

She nodded. It was blurry now, a flashbulb memory she'd thought about far, far too many times. "He said you were a monster, a cold-blooded killer without a soul, no redemption in your heart, headed straight to hell."

He shrugged. "Red's prob'ly not all that far off base there."

"I said that sometimes you have to do bad things to bad people to protect _good_ people," she continued. "I thought about Fisk a lot, about how many lives could have been saved if he'd been shot by someone like you, not put away by someone like Matt."

He didn't speak this time and that was almost as unnerving as when he did and saw right into her soul. 

"Point is," she said, trying to get back around to where she was going with this. "We argued over it, over you. I said that I thought you were important, that The Punisher was necessary and that you need an iron fist to protect this city, not a guy in a devil mask that doesn't..." The word _ineffective_ sprung to mind, but she didn't say it aloud. "He looked at me like I... like I'd personally shot his dog."

"Damn, and he didn't kill you on sight for that?" Frank drawled. "Me and Red really are different. I don't abide dog killers."

She grumbled under her breath. "He's blind, there's no sight."

"You said looked at you," Frank retorted. 

"It's--" She wanted to say _a figure of speech_ , but really the answer was-- "Well, he could see me well enough in his own way."

"Yeah," he said and scuffed the heel of his hand against his knee. 

"I always felt judged after that," she said, "more than ever. Like... my opinions, my thoughts, my--" Actions. "--choices in life, he'd always be judging them. I felt like I couldn't relax." 

"Is that when you two..." Frank said, trailing off.

"I guess," she said. "Honestly, I don't know when we started or when we ended." Maybe when she walked into that hospital room holding Matt's hand and let go of it for Frank. "I just know I felt judged by him and it always made me want..."

"To use," he finished for her and she nodded jerkily, picking at her bitten-down nails. 

He scribbled _being judged_ down on her side of the list, but not on his own, and tapped his pen against the paper. "Gotta ask," he said after a minute. "I ever trigger you?"

She opened her mouth to say _no_ , an instant gut response, then shut it again, doing him the courtesy of questioning it, of running through their interactions. Being shot at didn't trigger her, being used as bait didn't either, his yelling in the courtroom just pissed her off and him being an idiot just made her want to-- 

"No," she said after a moment. "No, you... don't trigger me, Frank. You never have."

He searched her face, but her moment of contemplation seemed to be enough to convince him she wasn't lying to make her feel better. "Wanna finish off the sheet with me?" he said and she nodded. He pulled her closer with the arm still flung around her shoulders and she tucked in against his side, closing her eyes and breathing in his familiar scent, the one of comfort. Peace.

Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm gonna try and go back to regular updates. New Year and all has WHUPPED MY ASS and that's the tea right there. I've had some problems with a friend and in general it's just been a rough time. My birthday is coming up this week (24th Feb for those who give a shit) but I'm finally settling back down after Christmas (I'm chronically ill, as I've said before, so things take a while to recover from) and I'm back at driving lessons and I'm back at writing properly and I'm doing art again and managing my sleep and generally feeling waaaaaaaaay better. 
> 
> How're you all? I missed you guys.

**Author's Note:**

> You should follow me on Twitter, Dreamwidth etc if you wanna keep up to date with me or read my original works. I write good shit, I swear! ♥ (@sixstepsaway in both places)


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